still thinking of one

Occasions for the experience of grief

2012-01-25T17:22:00.000-08:00

I was with Nora for about two years, but there was never a day in that brief relationship when I did not feel like it was the last one I would be spending with her. And I do not mean this in any romantic way. The feeling bred not an exciting sense of danger, but a terrible sense of insecurity and utter worthlessness.

I met Nora shortly after her parents died, although I learned of this fact only a year after she moved in with me. When I asked her why she never told me such an important thing, she stared at me for a long time before getting up and taking out her black folio. Then she started talking about her experience in the field, about how the attitude of non-grieving people towards grief only makes grieving an even more painful and difficult experience for the survivor. She went on to tell me about heavily militarized communities that she often went to, and described the impact of media coverage and military presence on people have who lost loved ones. She showed me photographs that did not make it to the mainstream presses which, Nora said, put out only those images that manifest grief in ways that people easily understand.

She spread out on the table several photographs of women sitting in corners, hanging colorful clothes to dry, or standing by trees and lampposts staring into a distance. There were pictures of gaunt men huddled in groups or going about what looked like ordinary tasks, feeding roosters, chopping wood, things like that. And then there were photos of children playing, and actually laughing, looking like any ordinary, happy children. I looked and looked at the photographs and did not find anything to help me understand her point, though I tried very hard to convince myself that I saw what she saw – various manifestations of grief.

***

Those photographs, the way she dealt with my question, haunt me to this day. Clearly, I was tested and I failed. I was accused and I had no valid defense. To be accused – for it surely felt like an accusation – that I had no capacity to understand and empathize with her, rankled. I am, after all, what many would call a sensitive guy, someone who’s in touch with his feminine side, having been brought up by a household dominated by women. I may have never experienced as profound a loss as death in my immediate family, but I had a very deep well of reading and viewing and listening experience to draw from. I should have been given a chance to feel, at the very least. Her utter lack of confidence in my capacity for empathy should have warned me. Everything about her should have warned me – she was older, worldlier, and wiser. She was also strikingly beautiful – long limbs, luminous skin, huge eyes, and breasts so full and shapely they make you forget about the other attributes I just enumerated.

I met Nora in a segunda mano thrift shop along Kamuning. I was there negotiating with the owner, Valentino, to let me go through his collection of 1960s beauty pageant photos, and to let him lease out to me the unit above his shop, so I could turn it into an apartment. She was there to look at post-war Manila photos of someone called Teodulo Protomartir, and to convince Valentino to lend her the negatives so she can have them scanned for a book. Nora had a keen interest in photographs and in wars, I later learned. She was a correspondent for a foreign press agency. I had a keen interest in vintage photographs as well, especially those of beautiful women, and in finding an affordable apartment for myself. I was an instructor of Freshman English in a mediocre state college.

When I met Nora, she was on a brief break from work which required frequent travels to Mindanao, or to wherever the insurgency was most heightened, wherever mortality rates were highest, as part of her regular assignments. For my part, I was then involved in a protracted war with my sisters and my parents whom I had been trying very hard to convince to let me live away from home, or at least somewhere outside Roxas District where I had lived all my life, as part of my bid for independence. She was thirty-five. I was twenty-five. It was a match made in second-hand heaven, witnessed by a man who called himself Valentino.

***

And on the third day

2011-09-18T19:17:00.000-07:00

she rises, takes the longest shower of her life, and puts on the most dressy she can find in her suitcase -- which is to say something that does not resemble pajamas. She then plays Patti Lu Pone and takes out her makeup kit. Once she starts arching the brows with a dark brown pencil, she cannot stop. She makes it a little heavier than the usual. She curls and thickens the lashes with grayish brown mascara until they look plastic and false, like the ones used during performance. Then she lines the eyelids a lighter shade of brown, and layers them on with bronze shadows, and a touch of glimmer just under the eyebrows. She outlines the lips a fine deep burgundy and fills it with the brightest cherry red. A pinch to the cheeks, a sweep of rouge, and she is almost done, when the door opens. The doctor, followed by the day nurse, enter the room, and they both do a double-take. Their audible surprise calls attention to the caregiver who has been glued to the TV the entire time she has been painting her face. And he asks in surprise if she is going out, and where. She checks herself in the mirror and is almost shocked at how heavy her makeup is, how she looks almost unrecognizable, more so to these people who have gotten used to seeing her barefaced, in jerseys and leggings and cotton shirts, and now so heavily made up, so early in the day. Malakat ka? Makain ka? Yes, to someplace, to meet with some friend. She tries not to sound too defensive. She cannot think of a place to go or anyone to meet. She stays in the hospital the entire day, giving anyone who enters the door a mild shock, to see her on the couch reading, or next to the hospital bed tending the loved one, or in front of the computer surfing the net, surveying the facebook landscape, joining in on conversations without actually typing in anything by way of response. In heavy makeup.

Chivas and chika

2011-07-30T11:28:00.001-07:00

with Bookworms. Best way to spend Saturday nights.

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My first

2011-05-23T07:01:00.001-07:00

book is coming out soon.
I am grateful.

After the body displaces water
stories

By Daryll Delgado

automatic writing 3

2011-01-04T11:29:00.000-08:00

unbearable, awkward constrictions; the increasingly loud syncopation; the too-fast rhythm that you can barely move or breathe to; neither walk, run, nor lay to; much less dance to. tonight, when you lie, and tomorrow, when or if you awaken, what must you do with the rampage, the iron hooves and angry feet, the wild race that continues -- the entire history, really, in and of your child heart? hear this, can you hear my plea, you seem to be saying with your flailing little hands, with your eyes which stare back at me from inside the little glassed-in room, eyes that see through me, beyond me. measuring eyes i cannot not read. ready, alert eyes, even when they can barely keep themselves open, pulled in shut by pain, sucked in by valves and vessels that are about to explode, from exhaustion, from keeping the little organ intact all these long years. years spent growing up too fast in a household that has slowly, ambivalently taken you in, out of pity, out of fear, out of nothing but those eyes, that tiny body. dying now, i can see that, i recognize that release for which that body is begging. in generosity, in service, it made no difference, that little body always seemed to be begging for something, always. all ways of forgetting i have mastered are now rendered useless against the memory of those eyes, the only indication of the furious little beast about to burst out, finally, from its cage. age: fifteen; time of death: 6 in the morning; life on earth: painful and brief; struggle: never-ending, never known; smile: wan, always, and unforgettable; grace: utterly unbearable.

(in memory of maimai).

automatic writing 2

2010-10-27T04:06:00.000-07:00

How do I do this without implicating myself, revealing too much? Much of what i know of theory is that everything is about me, and in my dreams, therefore, you are I. I want to tell you, I feel I should, warn you about a dream I just woke up from. From what I can remember, there was a dark alley, and we were being pursued by a menacing figure. Figuring out the chronology, forcing my own logic onto the dream scenes is wrong, I suppose. Suppose, however, I tell it this way: we hid in the bushes, and then watched a musical. Music, almost, that I still hear humming in my pillows. Low, slow, now bouncing against bare motel walls, now entwined with this unexpected Virginia rain. Rain fell on us as we squeezed into the impossible space between the ground and the thick thorny plants. Plant, skin, breath, pebble, knee, forearm, shoulder, stone, bone, neck, thorn, chest, nape, branch, elbow, collateral ligament, that soft inside edge. Edging closer, heavy steps approaching, and then it's the musical, again, a bare stage, you and I, or, fine, I and I, singing, pressed together, don't ask me how.

Open Angle (fiction, abridged)

2010-10-12T01:55:00.000-07:00

I arrived on the 5A.M. flight and it was still dark when I entered the house. The only light that was on was the one over the staircase. The smooth granite floors were softly illuminated. The winding staircase looked like it was floating in a gleaming sea of darkness. All in all, it had the effect of a surreal stage and lighting design. I was then a lighting design apprentice. I made a mental note of the properties – visibility, safety, and cost – of the lighting fixtures I was going to propose for the play I had just been recruited to be a part of. I noted the possible locations and positions of the lights on the stage.

I dragged my suitcase across the floor and was about to lift it as I reached the stairs when I was startled by a dark figure in the living room. I dropped my suitcase in surprise and the figure, seated on the sofa, turned to my direction briefly before facing the window again. It was my dad.

I knew that he didn’t see me. He was almost completely blind by then and only went by his memory. I will explain this later. He also couldn’t hear very well without his hearing aid, which he only wears to church or to the court, so I decided to walk toward him instead.

When I neared him, I realized that he was speaking in a low, conversational voice. I thought at first that he was addressing me, and then I realized that he was addressing someone else. That is, it very much looked and sounded like he was talking to someone named Buddy, the name his friends called him, when he was young. And then I saw that he had a cigarette in one hand and a glass of brandy in the other!

Everyone in the house – the two household staff, the driver, and the caregiver – vehemently denied giving my Dad cigarettes or pouring him brandy. The very idea appalled them, and they didn’t hide their opinion over the absurdity of the accusation.

The caregiver, who had always been sensible and practical, and neither given to superstition nor the supernatural, after much prodding from the others, finally declared: “It was Buddy who gave him the cigarette, poured him brandy, and did other things besides.”

The caregiver was right in that matter, but he had to be dissuaded on others. I told him who “Buddy” was. But it turned out that he was correct when he said that Dad wasn’t talking to himself “in a multiple personality disorder kind of way,” as we were also later told, although this, too, was explored extensively by the doctors whom we eventually consulted.

I told the neurologist that Dad had been having a hard time adjusting to his loss of eyesight, and had been depressed for a long time. I told him about Dad’s behavior at the hotel, where he was confined for several days after the surgical procedure.

It had been a week since the surgery. I had barely slept when I sensed my dad awaken from what I suspected wasn’t exactly the most fitful of sleep. I had been trying, for the last several days, to get used to the sight of him – eyes covered in plaster and bandages – and was very relieved when the bandages were taken off the day before.

I heard him groaning. I turned to his side to watch him very slowly lift his legs and drop them heavily to the carpeted floor. Then, he pushed down on his feet and tried to maneuver a sitting position. It was excruciating to watch. He fell back on the bed a number of times until he somehow managed a most awkward sitting position – his body tilted to the left, his head almost dropping to his shoulder, and his hands trembling, as he tried to plant them on the bed more firmly. He straightened himself up a bit and faced the wall.

I watched him stare at the wall. The room was bathed in soft light still, even if the sun had risen probably an hour ago already. The light softened his features too, gave his skin a kind of glow, made him look so much younger and healthier than he actually was.

Good thing we had opted for hotel, rather than hospital confinement, I thought. The doctor just came to visit once a day. The hotel was located right across from the bay. We had no view of the sunrise since the room faced the Manila Bay, the idea being that since we’re staying in a hotel called Sunset View, we might as well pay for that view. This was also one of the post-surgery treats we had promised our father, and ourselves – a spectacular view of the sunset. We did not factor in the possibility that he might not see anything at all right after the surgery, that his eyes would still be bruised and traumatized, and will take some time to recover, if at all.

Dad straightened himself up further. I was tempted to stand and assist him, but wasn’t sure if that gesture was going to be appreciated. So I just watched him -- no, watched over him . When he had stabilized himself, he let out a deep sigh, and then I saw him reach both arms for the wall, or something, someone by the wall.

“Dad,” I called out to him. “’Tay,” I called out even louder, to snap him out of what I thought was a dream. He continued to ignore me. And then I saw him nodding, heard him talking. I got up from bed and walked over to him, stood in front of him. He just looked past me. I peered into his eyes, and they looked very much like they were seeing eyes, but they weren’t seeing me.

To be fair, the surgeon had never promised anything about eye sights being restored, only, at the most, the physical eye being preserved.

“Surgery, if you take this option, and I am hoping you will, would involve either laser treatment or making a cut in the eye to reduce the intraocular pressure, what we call the IOP. The type of surgery doctors recommend usually depends on the type and severity of the condition. But the point of the procedure is to help lower the IOP, especially when medication is no longer sufficient,” the doctor had explained the week before, holding up colored photo prints of cross-section images of my father’s corneas and irises.

I had stood behind my father’s wheelchair, and every now and then whispered to him what the doctor was saying.

“We have several options daw. Based on your tests, you are a good candidate for a procedure that has proven very effective for patients with a similar case. Basically, the procedure will involve creating a kind of bypass in your eye, so that the pressure will be controlled, and then the eye can slowly start working again! This is all very good news!” I pressed his shoulders and half-hugged him for emphasis.

“Normally, we would recommend laser surgery first, before filtering microsurgery. But if the eye pressure is very high, and the optic nerve is badly damaged…” He made circular motions over a certain part of the picture with a laser pointer.
The doctor paused, in mid discussion, to give me time to digest the information and to relay it to my dad.

And, I translated: “The doctor’s saying that there are several variations to the procedure, but that your type of glaucoma, a rare one in this country, and common among Caucasians, would seem to require a certain type of surgery too. Kasi, you’re a mestizo!”

The doctor raised his eyebrows, the only sign of impatience and incredulity he allowed himself. And then he continued. “With laser surgery, we use a tiny but powerful beam of light, right here, basically, to make several small scars in the eye’s trabecular meshwork…”

Me: “That’s the eye’s drainage system daw…”

“Yes, actually, it is the eye’s drainage system,” the doctor said, and I tried not to show how embarrassed I was that he could hear everything I was whispering to my dad after all. “And the scars we make will help increase the flow of fluid out of the eye,” he said, now making short slow waving motions under the eye.

He paused again to give me time to translate, but I let him continue.

“On the contrary, the filtering microsurgery would entail, yes, creating a ‘drainage hole’, with the use of a small surgical tool, instead of a beam of light. We perform this, sometimes, after laser surgery does not successfully lower eye pressure, or if the pressure begins to rise again after some time...”

Me, in a much lower voice: “So, the procedure basically ensures that the drainage system in your eye works properly, so it won’t clog and increase the intraoccular pressure. You need daw to release some of the pressure, in the form of fluids, tears…” And at this point, my dad turned to me with a questioning look, but I continued. “So, yes, the process involves keeping the tiny passages clear and… well, healthy that way, so it can let light enter and the eye can do what it is supposed to do…”

The doctor started turning off the viewing board, and turned to switch the room lights on, still elaborating on the procedure. He returned to his table and faced us.

“The surgery will preserve the eye, the physical properties, however, it cannot reverse vision loss,” he said, waiting for me to respond.

“Dad, the procedure will preserve what eyesight you still have, and there’s still apparently a good amount of that, it’s just sort of covered by all the pressure, which the procedure will reduce permanently, so that the eyesight is maximized, and then little by little, maybe even in very micro levels so that you’ll hardly sense it, I mean that’s why the procedure is called microfiltering, so the eye, as the pressure decreases, adjusts, little by little, in vey micro levels, to the cleared up passages, after being so used to clogged ones for a long time, because it will take some time to adjust to the absence of something that’s been there for a long time, and then, yes, little by little, in very micro levels, the eye will slowly start to see… You’ll just have to be very patient, really.”

“I just want to know that I’ll be able to read again, look at pictures of my wife, enjoy my daughter’s work” he said, addressing the Opthalmologist.

The surgery took place at 7 in the morning the following day. The orderlies wheeled Dad out of the room at six, and by eight-thirty, I was called in to the recovery room. My dad was in a wheel chair, both of his eyes were bandaged shut.

The doctor came out of the lab and told me that although both eyes had to be covered, they did not actually touch Dad’s left eye, that it was only actually the right eye they operated on. He explained that the left eye did not have any vision left at all, so surgery would not have done anything, and might have only traumatized it further. The right eye, however, still had about 8% of vision left, except that the functioning parts are outside the core, that is why he could not see complete images, rather he only sensed them when there is movement, so that, at best, he could see the outlines or the silhouettes.

To my dad, I said: “The surgery was successful! The doctors were able to save your eyes from being eaten up by the disease! They will slowly recover from the scars of the surgery and then very slowly, little by little, the eyesight that is left will be put to work again.”

To me, the doctor said: “We should really show your dad the whole picture, so the process of adjustment can be facilitated.”

He would never be able to see again, the doctor said, in as plain and stark a manner as he could.

So I knew we had a problem when I heard Dad saying, that morning, a week after surgery, that his vision, indeed, was back, one hundred percent! Praise the Lord, he even added.

Hallucinations were one thing, but this, this was something else.

I decided to stay in my dad’s room that fateful weekend, so that I could observe him. Earlier that day, his caregiver had said that he had overheard Attorney and Buddy talking again, about taking a trip, visiting a friend who lived three towns away from the city. The caregiver said that he was worried about what my dad would do, or what Buddy would do to my dad.

So I volunteered to watch over Dad, hold vigil, and record the whole thing, in order, finally, to settle the matter with the caregiver.

By twelve midnight Dad was snoring, while I was still at work on a lighting design for an upcoming play. I motioned for his caregiver to retire for the night as well, and he gratefully left the room. I locked the door after him.

The room had two windows, one facing the east and another one facing the south. Between the two windows sat my dad’s old desk, and on top of it my mom’s picture. I moved the desk so that I could continue to work and chat on my laptop while frequently glancing over to where Dad was, snuggled now under the covers, and snoring rather loudly.

I continued to chat with my mentor over YM, and excitedly explained to him my proposal: how to position the lights, where to locate them, so that when they’re all turned on, the effect is the opposite of illumination.
When I glanced over to Dad, he was no longer there.

I swear I did not doze off, I couldn’t possibly have. Even if I did, I know that it was only for a few minutes, because my last chat response said so.

Needless to say, nobody believes me. Needless to say, we looked all over for him: In the house, in the village, all over town, all over the country! We have been looking for four years! Four years.

It’s very hard for me still. Although, in many ways, yes, perhaps also the best. The best for me, and for everyone concerned. I know, I understand where people come from when they accuse me of these horrible things, because it is true that I have been, well, enriched by the situation. But how can I defend myself? How can I tell people of just what my dad and I went through after my mom’s death? Why should I even bother?

I still come home as often as I can, to check on the properties, the caretaker. To warm the old house, so to speak.

I still prefer to take the 5A.M. flight, and it is dark when I enter the house, the only light that is on is the one over the staircase, the smooth granite floors are softly illuminated, the winding staircase looks like it is floating in a gleaming sea of darkness.

we try hard

2010-09-27T09:20:00.000-07:00

for our sundays to be more like the ones we grew up with.

we challenge ourselves, build the fire ourselves, melt and mold the gelatin ourselves.

but first it must look like this:

so it can become this:

and then we top it off with this!

The Project (fiction, an excerpt)

2010-09-24T09:16:00.000-07:00

The concept
The concept is very rich. It is hardly new, not exactly groundbreaking, but it promises many possible subject positions, ideological standpoints, from which we readers can view and assess the subject matter being tackled by this project being presented before us.

This so-called “middle class, urban, self-involved, ultra aware, highly emotional, at turns petty, pretentious, confused, languageless, hungry, empty, and ultimately at a loss,” Philippine human scribbler of the 21st century is a peculiar subject. Indeed it is. A peculiar subject, and therefore a worthy matter that, I am more than convinced, merits our attention and investment.

Apart from offering various standpoints, what the project also seems to be proposing is for these locations being made available to the readers, to become locations of self-slash-selves or inter-subjectivity-slash-subjectivities. This is an outdated idea, for sure, but it is in its very suggestion – and not suggestiveness –, that the quaintness – a quaintness we can easily repackage and sell – lies.

On the matter of quaintness, I presume we are all in agreement, and so I will no longer go into a discussion, of its economic and political significance.

We then move to the next criteria, the execution.

After the body displaces water (fiction)

2010-09-08T21:53:00.000-07:00

Part I.
http://www.philippinesfreepress.com.ph/06-2010/after-the-body-displaces-water-a-manual-for-divers/

Part II.
http://www.philippinesfreepress.com.ph/07-2010/after-the-body-displaces-water-a-manual-for-divers-part-ii/

automatic writing

2010-09-06T20:31:00.000-07:00

because it has been too long since I made the resolve months ago to revive this blog
because it has been two months since i posted the notice in this blog and nothing has followed after that because there is not much to write about
because it is not true that there is nothing to write about
because the truth is that there is much so much but i am swamped with work and family and self and selves
because it is not true that i have that many interesting selves that each one demands time away from writing
because writing matters to me it is everything and i should write every single day
because i should stop writing in the way i do now with and in my mind only
because the mind truly has no limits and is the one thing that astonishes still
because we need limits and margins and edges of things
because surfaces have real edges even if they tend to make things seem cramped and brutal and short
because life is actually cramped and brutal and much too short
because it is too damn long and boring and everything keeps happening over and over again and people don't learn their lesson
because people sometimes do learn their lesson and undergo remarkable transformations and are amazing absolutely amazing that way
because i need amazement and nothing else
because one day when it seemed like it had been too long since anything amazing has happened i opened my inbox and found three poems
because discovering poetry while randomly checking personal emails in the middle of a busy workday restores my faith in a big way
because i need faith and my faith needs restoring every now and then
because the only other person who had such faith and such a relationship with faith has left for another country and i have no one to go to a church with on random days
because i think of leaving the country too
because i am starting to hate the constant leaving and saying goodbye and have recently developed a paralyzing sense of anxiety over flying
because there is no exhilaration like the exhilaration of taking off and that final lurch before flying
because exhilaration is the only way and the only way to exhilaration is to take off and fly and do it on very early mornings
because one very early morning when i was convinced that there was nothing nothing nothing more to this you do the one thing that helped me finally close my eyes and truly peacefully sleep
because i need to sleep and have been troubled by the lack of it in a way that is not healthy for everyone concerned
because to me it is essential that everyone concerned do not remain concerned for too long
because this has gone on long enough and i can now allow myself to stop just stop.

reboot

2010-07-07T23:08:00.000-07:00

i want to revive this blog. i have been trying to recall the initial impulse for putting it up in the first place. i do remember that i started this blog at a time of major transition, at a time when one could not afford to think in terms of what's certain or uncertain, when what was there was all that was there, when one was always only half aware of things coming to an end, of the potential tragedy that underlined every innocent, hopeful, gesture. when all acts were, after all, just symbolic of other acts. all of those leading up, ultimately, to this. this life, this work, this job, this apartment, this set of friends, this afternoon, this cup of coffee, this sore throat, this insistence for a stick of cigarette. whatever this is, it has remained, more or less unchanged, in the last four years. of course, then, prior to this, i had no means to recognize those episodes for what they were. the mind is amazing that way. it puts up these shields, making the body invincible for the time being.

when this blog was put up, it only had ten, or maybe less, links. and that seemed to have been the point then. it was part of a conversation, a small gathering. i know that it is probably too soon to romanticize those times. but, i want to revive this blog, nevertheless, because i want to recreate those times. (maybe this rebooted blog can be all about the question: what were "those" times?).

i want to fabricate again that space, that voice, which was both innocent and weary, intimate and open, hesitant but ready. ready to disappear, whenever it had to.

i will not make any commitments. and this blog has no one to commit to. but, for the time being, this blog is alive again. and will contain only, or mostly, live texts, live entries. if there is such a thing. all texts are essentially dead. only the author is ever alive.

the textures, the colors,

2010-03-29T09:49:00.000-07:00

the movements. to witness absolute freedom, and unmistakable precision, of expression. nothing like it.

i haven't been satisfied with any performance this way in a long time. just came from the imogen heap concert at the esplanade in singapore, and she was brilliant. and playful, and fun, and entertaining, even if a little too trippy at times, and worth every peso i spent and more. when she announced that she'll be back in singapore before the year ends, i went crazy and screamed "come to manila!!!"

let's hope she does.

(pictures to follow)

international women's day

2010-03-07T16:49:00.000-08:00

and everybody says this about their mother, but, nanay was really beautiful, and i would say this had she been someone else's mother.

not too late

2010-01-15T17:28:00.000-08:00

for resolutions, is it? here are mine:

1. sleep more
2. drink less
3. walk more
4. sit less
5. read more
6. talk less
7. write more
8. write less (write shorter stuff, that is)
9. call home more often
10. go out less often
11. be more patient
12. be less tolerant

there. one resolution for every month of the year. let's see if we can still recognize this version of me. happy new year all! =)

Preludes

2009-12-13T22:12:00.000-08:00

(fiction, an excerpt)

A man died singing. He had sung a total of three songs before he heaved his last breath and collapsed on a chair. It happened at the Municipal Hall. The time was three in the afternoon. The sun was high. Heat seeped into people’s bones. Tuba warmed their blood even more. Someone’s ninth death anniversary was being celebrated. Another man’s life in that party ended. It ended on a high note.
…

At that very moment, Nenita, the wife, was at home, picking leaves for a medicinal brew.
Earlier that day, Nenita had been lying on the sofa, slipping in and out of an afternoon sleep she should not have heeded, embracing Willy Revillame in her dreams. She had had no plans of taking a nap. She had just wanted to catch a glimpse of Willy after she sent off her grandson for the city, before she resumed her cooking.

At the sala, she opened the window to let some breeze in. But the air was so dry. Outside it was very quiet. Everyone was at the Hall, to attend the ninth death anniversary of the juez. Most of them bore the judge a grudge, but they were all there anyway, eager to see what kind of feast his children had prepared. The children had all come home from America and Europe for this very important occasion in the dead man’s journey. Nenita herself did not mind the judge so much, even if she had always found him rather severe. It was the wife whom Nenita did not feel very comfortable with. There had been some very persistent rumors involving the judge’s wife that Nenita did not care so much for.

As soon as Nenita was certain that her grandson had left, she positioned the electric fan in front of her, sat on the sofa, and turned on the TV to catch the last segment of her favorite show. The next thing she knew, Willy Revillame was pulling her into his arms, soothing her with words of condolences, before handing her some cash and offering his left cheek for a kiss. There was a huge applause from the studio audience, even if they were all weeping with him, shaking their heads in amazement.
Nenita forced herself out of the dream and the motion brought her entire body up and out of the sofa. She found herself standing in the middle of the sala, face-to-face with a teary-eyed Willy. Her heart was beating wildly. Her armpits were soaked in sweat. Her hair bun had come undone. She looked around guiltily, she thought she heard her husband swear at her. She felt her husband’s presence in the living room with her, even if she knew he was at the death anniversary party. She quickly turned off the TV and made her way to the kitchen.

She should not have taken that nap, Nenita berated herself. There was an urgent order for ten dozens of suman she had to deliver the next day, for the judge’s daughters who were leaving right after the anniversary. There was already a pile of pandan leaves on the kitchen table, waiting to be washed and warmed, for wrapping the sweet sticky rice rolls with.
She had spent all night until early morning boiling the sticky rice and mixing it with anise, caramel and coconut milk, until her hands trembled and the veins swelled. By the time she was almost done, she had to prepare breakfast and brew a special tea concoction for her grandson who had spent all night drinking. He had very barely made it home – drunk as a fish, crying out a woman’s name like a fool – early that morning.

Nenita then remembered that she also had to prepare the medicinal tea her husband needed to take with his dinner. She had yet to complete the five different kinds of leaves, Ampalaya, Banaba, Bayabas, Dumero, Hierba Buena, the last one she purchases from a man who only comes to town on Thursdays. She was getting ready to pick Ampalaya and Bayabas leaves from her garden when she heard her husband’s voice again, his singing voice. She realized that the sound was coming all the way from the Hall. The sound was very faint, but more than perceptible, and certainly unmistakable to her.

It was the only sound she could hear, when she stepped out of the house and started picking the leaves. Everything else around her was quiet and still. It seemed as though the entire town – the dogs, the frogs, and the birds included – had gone silent for this very rare event: her husband singing again.

She had not heard her husband sing this way in a very long time, ever since he became ill – when the sugar and alcohol in his blood burned the sides of his heart, almost getting to the core of it. Since then, he would get out of breath when he sang. And he also easily forgot the lyrics, especially to the Italian classics, and some of the Tagalog Kundiman he used to be very well known for.

Nenita herself never understood all the fuss about her husband’s singing, and the fuss his brothers and sisters made when he stopped singing. She could not even understand half of the songs he sang. They were mostly in Italian, Spanish, and Tagalog. He rarely sang Bisaya songs, the ones she could understand, and actually liked, even if she herself could not carry a tune to save her life. Thankfully, their grandson was there to indulge her husband in music talk. She was happier listening to the two of them talk and sing, and strum guitar strings, from the kitchen.

She used to feel slighted whenever her siblings-in-law recalled with such intense, exaggerated regret, the way their brilliant brother squandered his money and his talent, and oh, all the wrong decisions he made along the way. Including, though they would never say directly, his decision to marry Nenita. They liked to remind their brother, themselves, and anyone who cared to listen, of what their brother used to be, what he could have been, whom he could have been married to. Nenita ceased to mind this, and them, a long time ago. She had forgiven all of them. They were all dead now, save for one brother who lived in the city. She never stopped praying for their souls, but she was not very sorry that they died.

Nenita knew that her husband was happy the way he was. She never heard him complain. He had nothing to complain about. She took him back every time his affairs with other women turned sour. She took care of him when he started getting sick, when the part of his heart that was supposed to beat started merely murmuring and whistling. Thankfully, her friend, the herbalista, had just the right concoction for this ailment. Even the doctors were delighted with her husband’s progress.

Nenita took her husband back again when, with the money her in-laws sent for his medication, he went away to be with one of his women. People say her husband went to Manila with the judge’s widow. Nenita never confirmed this. Nenita never asked. She just took her husband back. Nursed him back to health again. After that though, Nenita noticed that he spent more and more time alone, in the toilet. And when she asked if he needed help with anything, he would just mumble incoherently. So she let him be.

She could have prepared him then that other brew her herbalista friend had suggested at the time, the one that would make his balls shrink, give him hallucinations, make his blood boil until his veins popped. But she didn’t, of course.
She did buy and continued to keep the packet of dried purple leaves said to be from a rare vine found only in Mt. Banahaw. She didn’t even know where Mt. Banahaw was, only that it was up there in the North. She did know that she would never use the herbs, even if she wanted to keep it, see it, touch it, and feel the soft lump of leaves in her palm, every now and then. She derived some sense of security, a very calming sense of power, in knowing that she had that little packet hidden in one of the kitchen drawers.

She listened more closely to her husband’s singing. She closed her eyes and trapped her breath in her throat, the way she did when she listened to the beats and murmurs of her husband’s heart at night. Listening to the air that carried her husband’s voice this way, she almost caught the sound of his labored breathing, and his heart’s irregular beating.

He was singing a popular Spanish song now, about kissing someone for the last time. Nenita remembered being told by her husband that that was what it was about. Kiss me more, kiss me more, that was what the man wanted to tell the woman he loved. Nenita found that she could enjoy this one; the song was recognizable. She laughed lightly as she found herself swaying in slow, heavy movements, to the music of her husband’s voice.

She started imagining herself as a young woman, dancing with this beautiful, dark man who eventually became her husband. And then she heard him choke, heave a breath before he sang: Perderte. Long pause. Perderte. Another pause. Despues. And then there was applause, in which Nenita joined, still laughing at her silliness

After that, all was quiet again.

Nenita gathered the leaves and went back inside the house. Just as well, because it was starting to be very, intolerably, hot outside. Certainly hot enough to boil an old man’s blood and pop his veins, she thought.

Direct attacks on the imagination

2009-11-30T09:34:00.000-08:00

(a reply to/an echo of Chingbee's post. See: http://curiouscouch.wordpress.com/2009/11/29/we-tell-ourselves-stories-in-order-to-live/)

I have been to Mindanao several times. There are many Mindanaos. Many different kinds. I have been to a few of them. First, as a young dancer on tour with a dance company about 15 years ago, next as a fellow for the UP writers workshop almost a decade ago, and then several more times as a journalist and for NGO-related activities which always get me into close contact/require me to work with community organizers, lawyers, and media practitioners. In my most recent trip, I literally skirted the Mindanao which is now marked in our collective consciousness with backhoes, and shallow mass graves, and the image of a hundred gun-toting, crazed paramilitary men triumphantly leaving a very bloody scene, ready to resume their normal lives, after killing some 60 innocent unarmed men and women, on that beautiful Monday afternoon.

It is a sickening sight. You'd be totally without imagination not to be affected by it. It doesn't matter if you have never been to Mindanao, or know no one in Mindanao, or know little about Mindanao. The kind of calculated display of power, the very efficient application of a very specific kind of violence; the scale of it, the magnitude of it... The utter impunity with which it was carried out. This is hard not to imagine; rather, hard for our imagination to not be attacked in some way, to be tickled, at the very least. It is harder not to imagine that we have also, somehow, been attacked in a very deep and painful, and embarrassing, and disgusting way. My struggle since last week has been precisely this: against imagination.

I have been forwarded, but have no intention of checking the list of those who have been massacred. Not now, not soon, anyway. A week's worth of report writing has to be rushed in a day-and-a-half's time. A very dear friend, a very important person in my obscure little life just died. A bright light went out and created a permanent darkness in my little corner. This one will take some getting used to, a process that cannot be rushed. And yet I am able to cook, and eat, and shop, and watch movies, and drink with friends, drink with my sister, feed the dog, feed the household composed of my husband and myself, and entertain the occasional droppers by in our apartment. I even managed to start writing a 3-story cycle. I finished 2, and could not go on from there, however. My imagination finally abandoned me. Or, maybe, I need to write a different story altogether. Or, I need to write differently.

My friend, Chingbee, writes in her blog that "Given we artists are allegedly known for our imagination, then it would certainly be a failure on many counts if we are unable to imagine the Maguindanao Massacre as a direct affront to us, unable to imagine the means by which we can combat the seductions of silence and complacency and forgetfulness, unable to imagine the methods with which to address each other and cure our ignorance and ensure that life does not go on unmarked, unresponsive to, and unchanged by this most sickening of all the sickening events we have been through under this regime." She suggests that the story is the arena on which we must act, or fight. Just as the government has been shamelessly twisting the facts and exploiting the power of rhetoric to confound the public, so must we wrestle from them the words and the images, the characters and their motivations, the plots and the resolutions.

We must protect our truths, our stories. And, perhaps, we must tell [only] the stories that need telling in these difficult times.

husbands and wives

2009-11-12T05:32:00.000-08:00

Rain in Singapore today. Wet streaks across windows. Water pearls form on glass panes. Tops of buildings tower over trees, and melt in the milky haze.

The girls are still in bed, cowering under thick white sheets. Clothes, shoes, boxes of spices, bangles and beads, plastic and paper bags are strewn all over the carpeted floor. Steaming cups of coffee rest on window ledges.

I brewed the coffee. I hope the coffee aroma permeates their dreams, and eventually takes them out of their sleep. The girls continue to ignore it. I am almost done with my second cup.

We pooled our funds and got what passes for a suite in this tiny hotel. It is bright and airy. We are surrounded by windows. Windows look out into other people’s windows. This city-state is big on windows.

Everything here seems fabricated though. The chaos of street festivals, markets, shops, food stalls, have a disconcerting awareness in and of themselves. The non-Asians are easily fooled. Come to Mindanao, I want to tell them. Come to Quiapo. Come to Samar.

At the concert last night, my mind flew, and I missed out on some important pieces. I always need music to think. I did not know I needed to think of anything in particular last night. I will tell you later what I thought about.

I never quite just listen. I do not know how to just listen. I mean, I have very keen ears, they prick up when there’s a rupture in the harmony. But I cannot imagine this: sitting through a musical performance focused solely on the act on stage. My kind of music is that which takes me out of the act, out of the moment, makes the mind fly and expand. Makes my heart stop completely, as in an attack.

At certain parts of the performance, I was enrapt with the musicians backing up the main act. I realize I still have a fascination for second voices, and back-up musicians. Must be from all those years of singing first, and never learning second voice as a kid. When I sing without my siblings I cannot hear myself.

This is why I feel sorry sometimes for marrying you. I wanted so much to keep you as a backup vocal. You were my second voice. Now we sound alike. Does this make you make you mad when I say this?

We girls are here because our husbands make us sad. This is our collective secret, the general belief. The rationale for the shopping bags and the wine. Nobody here knows that I am happy. Even if I am married. Nobody would believe. It remains my part of the secret’s dirtier little secret. I am careful not to sound smug. You remain my biggest, most shameful, forbidden love.

A Guide To Cine Europa 12

2009-09-12T19:14:00.000-07:00

by Philbert Ortiz Dy
posted on Wednesday, September 09, 2009 in Festivals, Movies in
http://www.clickthecity.com/movies/?p=5593

the sick and the dying, the lonely and the broken-hearted

2009-09-08T00:54:00.001-07:00

Dearest Amelia,

It is raining here again. Skies were overcast all day. News says that LPA (that’s low pressure area) has already become Signal No. 1, and they’re calling it some male name now. Classes have been called off, office workers are making their way through traffic, trying to beat the heavy gray clouds gathering in the distance, desperate to be home, before the heavy rainfall. I do not know why I start with a description of the weather. Well, in your mails, you always talk about the weather. And you do it so well, so engagingly. The weather! Imagine that. I guess talking about the weather, where you are, is a real, legit way to pass the time. Here, it can be absolutely inconsequential, unless it is of the type that brings about floods and famine. You know, weather in the extreme. One afternoon, for instance, on my way home from work, I just happened to glance at the sky, and saw how beautiful it was, the brightest blue and the deepest pink in a wonderful, graceful, elegant sweep. I mass-texted people, telling them to look up, look up now! Guess how many replied? One. And all he said was: “cool”. It wasn't cool. It was a bit warm, actually, even if there was a slight breeze. But, there, see, everyday weather here does not affect us much. Life goes on. In your case, however, I am amazed at how it always matters, sometimes terribly so. The winter especially, no? I really hope you have recovered from it – the leaking pipes, broken boilers… Sounds real disastrous. Sorry. But then you get beautiful breaks for autumn, and spring, and now summer, too. It must be really lovely at this time of the year. Do you still grow flowers in your little yard? Do the blue and yellow birds still come for the dew on the leaves and the seeds you scatter for them on the ground? I really loved my time there with you. Here, you just don’t do that. You don’t notice the changes in colors, the flowers blooming or dying. You don’t feed birds. That’s too… I don’t know, indulgent? It's as though you're not allowed to appreciate the lighter, brighter things in life, in nature, being in a place where there's too much darkness, too much heaviness. Or, maybe it is just me.

This is embarrassing. One time, I was doing some work, out in our tiny backyard. The weather this time was pretty mild. And there were a couple of birds, you know, those brown ones we see everywhere. I shook out the contents of my bag of chips to the ground for them and they all scampered away. I waited, kept still, but they wouldn’t budge, balancing themselves on the barbed wires, waiting, keeping still. Staring at me like I was some loony. I stood up, went inside our house, and watched the birds from the windows instead. But they still wouldn’t make the move for the crumbs. Apparently, even these birds here think it’s crazy to feed them like that, like they’re your pets, and to not expect anything in return. El caught me spying at the birds from the window, and he laughed so hard the row of birds fluttered away in surprise. El obviously shares the sentiments of the suspicious, arrogant birds. It just is not done here. People do not feed birds! So, yes, please, do send me some of those pictures please, from my visit there three years ago.

I can’t believe it’s been that long. I can’t believe you’re a mommy now and that soon you’ll be taking little Tommy to football or wherever it is European mommies take their kids to. Or to the park to feed the birds, maybe? Haha. But, yeah, wow. Who would have thought, Ames? El and I have been talking more frequently about having one ourselves. A baby, I mean. I keep changing my mind about it. I mean I do want it, even if I will never say it. Not to anyone, anyway. I have not seen the doctor. Hell, I haven’t been to a hospital since my mother died three years ago. But I really should go, you’re right. I keep having these darting pains in my abdomen more frequently, pains like the ones I used to have, just before El took me to the hospital for, you know, that incident last year. I have a very deep suspicion that it would never happen again, that we would never be able to have one again. Ever. There. Thank you. I just had to say it. And I would rather that I be the one to tell myself that, than it be handed to me, you know, in print, in stark medical language. Then it would be really official. And I am not sure how I am going to take that. I feel really bad for El though. I really, really do. I feel bad, sad, on my own, too. Sometimes, I feel more angry than sad.

So… How’s the weather? Oh, we’ve already covered that. Sorry. What else is there… Do you remember Manu, from the org? Tallish, fair, sharp chin? Nice haircut, as in consistently well-styled hair? He had asked me out once, to go to mass with him, remember? And you all found that pretty funny. I laughed too. Except that I did not find it that funny. I sort of did want to go to mass with him, just out of curiousity. But, obviously, that was not going to be very cool. And so… Anyway. This is so weird. I have just been thinking about him lately. I mean, there was nothing there, right? Nothing to think about, nothing to dwell on. Except for that one time, during a Christmas party in someone’s mansion, in New Manila. I don’t know if you remember. You were pretty absorbed, enrapt actually, with whatshisname, the tall jerk. Sorry, I know you used to really like him. I didn’t. I didn’t really care much for that group, even if you were very much into them. Or they into you. They were too cool. Haha. And, really, I just wasn’t cool enough. Or, I don’t know. Maybe I just didn’t like them enough to want to be like them. But, that Manu. He was different, wasn’t he? He was not cool, as you guys made it very apparent, in your treatment of him. His fault, too. He wanted to go to church with me! Haha. Remember when, at some point during the party, people were lying on the ground, puking into the pool, you and your boyfriend decided you wanted to drive to the south, to Tagaytay, and you practically, literally dragged me. Manu ran after us, and I pulled him into the car, and made him drive. You remember? And we drove. I mean, he drove, you and your boyfriend sat – made out!— in the backseat. Manu and I tried not to look, tried very hard to stare ahead. We were both glad to be out of that party, actually. So we just drove on, past Ortigas, and then C-5, until we reached the city limits, and that’s when we noticed that you and your boyfriend had gone silent. You had both passed out! What a sight you both were. I wish we had digicams or phonecams then.

We could have turned the car back to the party, no? But we were on the South Luzon Express Way already. And it was quite nice, too – the quiet, steady drone of motor on highway tracks, the rush of the wind against our faces. The city and its noise, its buildings and its lights, all diminished the farther we went. Then we realized that we both didn’t know where Tagaytay was, exactly. Manu found a nice, safe spot, took the car to the side, and asked me if I wanted to step out and sit on the hood instead, cool ourselves before we head back. And so we did. We got out of the car, sat on the hood, and, you won’t believe this, we watched the stars. Did it ever occur to you, during your entire life in Manila, to look up to the night sky, to watch the stars? Manu was not as uncool as we all thought he was. Even if he was wearing a collared Bench shirt that night, tucked in his well-ironed slacks! While we were sitting on the hood, he untucked his shirt and kept smoothing the creases down. I don’t remember what we talked about exactly though. I vaguely recall him telling me about his father's home in the province, right in the middle of a field, where, apparently, they would take strolls, at night, and lie on their backs, look at the stars. How quaint, no? Or, maybe he didn't talk about that. Maybe we did not talk about anything at all. Maybe I am making it all up. But I remember him. You remember him, right? I do remember that night. I don’t think Manu and I ever talked to each other after that night though. Did he drop out of the org? He sort of disappeared, didn’t he? I bumped into him on campus, on a few more occasions, but he only ever nodded at me in slight acknowledgment and, always, there was this impenetrable look about him. I heard his name mentioned, a few years ago, in some forum. Apparently, he had moved back to his father’s province and started a rather progressive publication there. So many other things were said about him and his group. After that, though, I had not heard of him at all. Anyway… Why have I been thinking of Manu? I really don’t know. But, recently, every time there’s news of some organizer or reporter or social worker killed, it stifles my breath, clamps my heart shut for a second. And then, I have to stop whatever it is I am doing to scan the report for his name, for any wayward description that might identify him for me. When did I start to care so much? So, so strange, this. I really don’t know, Ames. Must be all these bad things happening around us...

A man was found dead in his apartment, just across from ours, did I tell you? Oh, Ames. Terrible. He had been dead for four days already, before the building maintenance guy here found him. I used to see this man every Saturday, watering his plants, sunning himself in his garden, with a dozen cats around him. I used to be so jealous at how the birds did not mind him. They would feed freely off crumbs of bread scattered on the table in front of him! And, he always said good morning. Nobody says good morning here in our apartment block. Nobody here feeds cats. Nobody here waters plants. Nobody here feeds birds! This man, he lived alone. He didn’t have family. No friends called on him, no lovers had breakfast with him. His plants died, too, Ames. His cats started loitering in other people’s apartments, spilling garbage cans over, stealing food from kitchens, screaming and scratching at each other, every single night, until they bleed. They have become unbearably violent, they have turned into such beasts, in their grief. Some started hanging out in our garage, pissing on our front steps, every single day, as if to tell us to deal with it, deal with US! The nice old man, whose name I never bothered to learn, who lived alone, who died alone, was responsible for the balance of things here in our little world!

I couldn't get up from bed all day yesterday. There were about twelve missed calls on my phone, demanding emails in my inboxes. I couldn't deal. Middle of the workweek, unconfirmed meetings, unsigned checks, unwritten reports, and there I was, worrying over what would happen to the dead man's books, the plants in his garden, the secret dvd collections, the very well-chosen clothes and shoes. Who's claimed his body from the crime lab? Who's going to light candles for him, hold vigil for him, say prayers for his soul? El said that we should light candles on his veranda, get his full name, offer him a mass, if that would make me happy. But that is a bit hypocritical, don't you think? We had all the chance in the world to get to know him and we didn't, and now he's dead. Since last week, I have been watching for movement in his apartment, waiting for anyone, someone, to come by, so I can talk to him or her, ask about the nice, strange, lonely man who lived and died there, all by himself. There are days when I am gripped with such a strong desire to know what's on his kitchen shelf, whose photographs he kept. What was the last satisfying meal he took? Whose number did he dial last? Other times, I feel extremely overprotective of his privacy. No one, not a single person has a right to know the insides of a house that has been well-lived in, alone, for many, many years.

Oh Ames, please come and visit me. Please let me visit you!

I think the typhoon just arrived. Signal No. 1 is here, intent on gaining force, turning into Signal No. 2. The streets will be littered with filth and mud, and canals will flood. Little houses will float, families will lose their homes. The displaced and the desperate will fill Baclaran, walk on their knees to implore the Mother of Perpetual help. A ferry will sink. Again. Some kid will try very hard to not let go of the hand of his brother, but the current will be very strong. Billboards will come falling on cars, killing their drivers. Or, maybe not. Maybe this is nothing. Maybe parents will be glad of the chance to leave work early, prepare steaming bowls of soup for the family. Kids will be happy making paper boats float on little streams. Lovers will be daring enough and will drive out of the city in the rain, to spend the night in some high altitude place overlooking a volcano's crater. Or, maybe they won't even make it there, getting only as far as the highway, far enough to say that they have left the city behind.

Dearest Amelia, how are you, really? You look happy in your pictures. You lost weight very quickly. But I am worried when you tell me that on your days off, instead of reaching for a book, or thinking of a poem to write, you just doze off instead, from fatigue. I was worried when, at the park, you cursed rather violently at a white man, and muttered, under your breath, that he deserved to be hungry and homeless. I am worried when you tell me that you shy away from other Filipinos who smile at you and approach you and want to talk to you at the park. Should I be worried? Maybe I shouldn't. Maybe I just am imagining all of these things. I cannot be relied on too much, these days. I am so utterly, terribly, embarrassingly maudlin. You wouldn't recognize me. But if you tell me you will come here for vacation, then I shall certainly be cheered, and I shall not bore you with my useless imaginings about the sick and the dying, the lonely and the broken-hearted, the poor and the unemployed, in a word, all who need your perpetual help… Amen. (I can’t believe I can still recite the Perpetual Help novena from memory!) Kidding aside, I promise not to bore you with issues at my work. And I promise not to drag you to one of El's hoity-toity art gallery events, either. And, I just might allow you to bring me to the doctor for that much-needed check up you've been bugging me about, or to drive to Tagaytay for a very sinful bowl of beef Bulalo. Which reminds me, I have to go and prepare dinner now, make myself useful around the house, close all the windows, shut the storm out.

Please, please you take care of yourself, Ames. Try to enjoy the brief summer respite. I miss you, miss you, miss you. Send my love to the little one, and his father, too.

Love, love,
J.

whose culture reigns?

2009-08-06T08:44:00.000-07:00

I've been conversing with FB friends on the whole national artist awards controversy, and i am not fully comfortable with how the messages are being shaped. i am attending the 'pagluluksa' tomorrow, but i cannot say that i am wholly in agreement with the movement's call. i think there is a need to inquire into the motive behind the act first. what does the president have to gain by doing what she did? i have a strong suspicion that this issue was created precisely to divide us, to expose the biases of the academic elite. and we are leading ourselves right into the cracks.

i don't think it was right, or even necessary, for the film critic Tioseco to say that the number of caparas films and wowowee viewers cannot ever be a barometer of culture. why not? why can't viewership ever be a gauge? maybe not according to established practice, or existing award criteria. but, who has a say on what defines culture, what doesn't? whose culture are we talking about anyway?

there was a very good opportunity to discuss various and varying notions of 'culture' during the ANC show; instead, only one prevailing notion surfaced: high culture.

the message in this campaign should be clear: there were clear, established processes, procedures, and parameters. and the president disregarded them. we protect the system, we uphold the standards; because these are what lend prestige to the award; these ensure that our money, our admiration, our approval for the use of the title 'national artist', go where they rightfully should.

flash creative non fiction

2009-08-03T02:29:00.000-07:00

"conversations, no. 2"
(random studies, from ten years ago!)

It is 6:39 P.M. when we enter my dingy apartment. The darkness in the living room breaks our conversation, and, for a moment, silence hovers, until female snores swell from the floor. We quietly step over my roommates, wrapped like blankets to/around each other. It is too late for embarrassments. In the shadows, their totally shameless shapes and figures are unmistakable.

Slowly we make our way to a corner, where a wooden foldable table stands for the day’s crumbs and scraps, which still cling onto the tabletop, along with some plates left unwashed for the next day or the next meal, if there will be any. What kind of life is this that you lead, I can almost hear my mother’s voice even as I am straining to hear what he’s thinking.

We grope for the three-legged bar stools, we smile at each other in conspiracy, our teeth bared, candid, in the dark. One takes out a lighter, the other whips up a candle. Soon, a willowy smoke and a tiny wavering flame, sufficiently disturb the concentration of black in our little corner.

In the miniscule light, the clarity of his eyes is a shock. I stare at the two tiny dancing pyres, one in each bespectacled black ball. I am hypnotized by the spectacle.

Oh, you were saying, we were talking about my wanting to go away to this small city in the Visayas, to live alone, and write, my ultimate wish. And he is quieted by this. Have we never talked this out before? We never really talk anything out, between the two of us. Why we got to talking at all, we never talk about that, too. I am emboldened to ask, while there are glowing wicks in his eyes flickering and swaying, animating his eyes like mad.

And what about you? You're not sure? You still don't know what you can do, what you want to do? I press on: You must want something fiercely, passionately; to be out of the ordinary. You know, you should forget for a while --

He doesn’t take his eyes away from my face. I know only because I cannot stop staring at them. He answers by asking: Can you forget for a while that your father’s back is exposed to the sun all day? That your mother is in a makeshift kitchen, blowing air into a pipe to keep the firewood burning for food to cook in time, for supper suffered in silence?

Once he said: We have become too poor to even afford decent conversation.

How do I tell him that wishes are free, that, sure, we have not even gotten to the discussion of our college thesis, that we might not even graduate and become decent members of the workforce, be the society’s saviors, the way we have been trained for! All that will be taken care of later. If I were a man, it would have been so easy for me to leave all this -- I gesture with my arms, to the sheaf of papers, the clutter on the table, the books scattered around the two entwined bodies on the floor.

I am drawn to life on the road, for some reason. If I were good enough with the guitars I’d be like Joplin, play in the streets –

Over this, he shakes his head and break into a lazy, lopsided smile - that endearing imperfection — then he takes off his glasses and exhales heavily onto them, creating fogs on the lenses that he briskly wipes off with the edge of his frayed collar. I am, all of a sudden, gripped with a terrible certainty: Things will change, irrevocably. You will not remember this.

I try to stop him from getting up to switch the lights on, from waking the two brazen mummies on the floor, from revealing the rest of the apartment in its full shabby glory.

It is not even 8:00 P.M. when the little white candle melts, and the dancing optic flames altogether disappear.

harry potter or mano pater?

2009-07-15T05:57:00.000-07:00

there's absolutely no comparison! mano pater is a living, breathing sorcerer. he types up my father's pleadings and memos on an old trusty olympia typewriter. he is very handy with ribbons and printwheels. he has all legal forms down pat. he doesn't need to consult any manual. he knows everyone who matters in the bulwagan ng katarungan. he has my father's back all the time. my dad is a 77 year-old provincial, pro-bono abogado. mano pater, who is probably older than my father, is his super senior-citizen secretario. (mp gets a kick out of being called that.) my dad's not doing too bad himself.

this is a very random post. i just wanted to weigh in on the whole harry potter buzz. may anyone who googles harry potter be misdirected to my post about mano pater.

MY SINCEREST SORRY

2009-06-04T06:30:00.000-07:00

for flooding your inboxes. i was merely trying to cross-post one item from my blogspot, the next thing i know, all 3 years' worth of posts are transferred to my multiply account. sorry, sorry, sorry.

daryll�

summer with scouts, pirates, and pregnant rats

2009-06-03T20:03:00.001-07:00

(an excerpt. story came out in FP's may 23 issue)

There would be this glint, this tiny wavering light, in Don’s eyes every time he talked about computers. It was a bizarre and unforgettable kind of glimmer, one that made me uncomfortable, and that made him look vulnerable, and then also uncomfortable.

Don was very tall, and this was another thing that he was clearly uncomfortable with. He stood at about 6 feet in height, but he was all flab. He did not look the least bit athletic. He really did look like the proverbial geek with sallow skin, in need of some fresh air and real sunlight. His front teeth were small and sort of pointy, which sometimes made him look malicious. But he wasn’t at all malicious. He loved Coldplay, was always borrowing my CDs, and he knew, with a fragile and desperate certainty, that he was destined for greater things than monitoring machines and pleasing foreigner bosses who couldn’t speak English, violated labor standards, and knew twit about computers.

Sometimes the glimmer in Don’s eyes wavered with sadness, sometimes with great hope, especially when he talked about finally taking that special two-level licensure exam online, or about presenting his new inventions and software to Steve Jobs at the Apple Convention, some day, some day very, very soon. All of these things he was saving his money and himself up for.

Like a pregnant rat, Gerry would say, a pregnant rat scrounging for bits and pieces of food and warm fabric for her lair. Gerry liked to kid Don about his miserly ways. I never got the pregnant rat parallel, until I almost saw one, that summer. They said that a rat had bore a hole into one of the corner posts of our old apartment. The boys had found the hole without the rat in it. Gerry and my brother proceeded to break up the burrow, fishing out all sorts of unrecognizable graffiti-like bits and pieces of once-whole things. With sticks and rods, they scratched and scraped the walls of the rat hole. And then, for good measure, my brother, with a strange mix of anger and playfulness in his actions, poured muriatic acid into it. Don and I had looked on, cringing at the thought of the rat, bloated with a litter of little black fetuses, smoked up in acid.

I never really saw the rat. But that did not stop me from dreaming of it for nights on end. I knew my boyfriend was getting exasperated with me stopping all of a sudden, in the middle of sex, because I was convinced that I saw the pregnant rat as big as a cat with a tail as thick as the body of a snake, darting from one corner of our room to another, or scampering under our bed.

One day, he just left – the rat, my boyfriend. He did not return for a week. I dreamt less of the rat, I noticed. When he came back, he had a stuffed toy mouse with him, a gift and a remedy, to satisfy my fascination and to stymie my fear. Ayan, para matigil ka na, he said. It drew a lot of laughter but was no good for much else. I was still bothered by the pressure our lovemaking was creating on the spring bed. I resumed dreaming of the rat trapped under the bed, stuck in the bed frame, its bloated stomach bursting, its head flattened, its thick wet tail flapping heavily, pounding the wooden floor.

I slowly learned to participate more actively in the sex, despite the nightmares, only because I had missed my boyfriend, and he was, well, very vigorous in his attempts and thrusts to make me not think of the rat. He became more and more creative in his ways to accommodate my irrational rodent fears and fascinations. I think it was during that summer when I started to truly love him.

***

The apartment was located in the not-so-glamorous part of the Scout Area. Sometimes, there was no water in the taps. Sometimes, there was flood in the bathroom floor. But it had three big bedrooms with huge wood-framed windows, a two-car garage with not a single car, lots of stray cats, no rats – none in sight anyway – and, in front of the apartment stood an old branchy tree that bore no fruits and hardly had any leaves.

That summer, when we moved into the apartment, was one of the country’s hottest. In the countryside, the fields had cracked open, waiting for a single rainwater to drop; the unnourished crops had shriveled up in desperation; animals dropped dead or wandered like ghosts in abandoned towns. All of these according to the papers, as sensationalized and dramatized to me by my silly boyfriend.

In an old apartment in Scout Tobias, corner Scout Santiago, he continued in his reportorial voice, people have shed off all manners of clothing, have been drained of all strength by the heat, and have barely enough energy left to… procreate. This is the beginning of the end, he said. We were in our room. The curtains were drawn. We could see the gnarly branches of the old tree outside. Everything was still. There was absolutely no breeze. But our bodies were entwined, sweating profusely, very much alive in the oppressive heat.

One payday, as my brother promised, he blew all his salary on a rather big air-conditioning unit, and had the thing installed in the living room, of all places. Before that, I had just bought a small television set with my scholarship allowance, and from then on that room was where we ended up congregating, after a long day’s work. I started broaching the idea of having cables installed, the very possibility of which excited us all. We would linger in the living room talking about what shows we would watch if we had cable TV, and what shows we used to watch all the time at home where we did have cable TV.

Although the summer ended with no cables being installed, with that same TV set literally exploding into pieces, the living room became the cooling and the coolest center of sorts in that scorching hot, old apartment. Eventually, it became a communal bedroom, dining room, and study room, too.

But we would only drink out in the garage, where we could freely smoke. This was the only house rule we created and actually followed. Besides, those summer nights were quite beautiful, even if humid. The skies were always clear, the stars vivid. Don liked to come out of his room at night. He liked the night stars, but not the sun. He liked to sit out and talk to us, but he hardly drank.

Gerry was the hard drinker and liked to play the guitar, sing Dylan, Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Freddie Aguilar, and then some Nirvana, too, for some strange reason. His thick muscled neck would turn red, the veins almost popping out, when he sang, always in earnest, but sometimes out of tune.

Gerry also liked to roll a joint every now and then, even at his age. Gerry was old. The oldest jologs in the world, we called him. He was old enough to be a grandfather, which he was; a fact that he was in denial of.

Gerry turned fifty that summer. I only remember this because that was the only Saturday he did not drink with us. We never really knew where he went that night, dressed in a white button-down shirt, black slacks, and shiny patent leather shoes. But he came back the next day, sober, dry-eyed. Strange. My boyfriend said that Gerry probably went to church, went to confession and did his penance; that was his secret life. My boyfriend was convinced that Gerry was just pretending to be astig, to be tough, when he was actually a saint with tattoos. Or, a secret agent of the intelligence bureau.

Once, I caught a glimpse of a photo of a young man and two boys in Gerry’s wallet. The young man in the picture looked exactly like Gerry, and that was how I knew that Gerry was certainly not, as my brother suspected, a pedophile, that those kids were not his preys. They were his son and grandsons. Well, you never really know these days, do you, my brother would often say. You could be standing right next to one in the toilet, in the bar counter, in the train, or you could be sharing a room with them, isn’t that right, Gerry? My brother joked. Don just raised his eyebrows and exaggerated a yawn. Haay, here we go again.

But it was Gerry who made the nastiest gay jokes. That’s why I first thought that Gerry might just be overcompensating, that he might be, in addition to being a saint and a secret agent, also gay. He never brought a girl home, nor went out with one; and he did share a room with Don. Gerry was also especially mean about Don’s rather soft ways, always making insinuations about Don’s being gay, which Don might have been, if he weren’t too preoccupied with his software dreams. He could have easily taken advantage of the rooming situation with Gerry.

Gerry did have a rather remarkable twenty-year old laborer’s body, I told my boyfriend once. And my boyfriend said I was the one who was being mean, this time. But it was true. Gerry had the unhealthiest habits, had no notion of exercise or diet, but had the hardest abs, the firmest forearms, and the tightest buns. I swear to God. I never really bothered to find out where he came from and all. But his body, usually clad in ridiculously tight and short denim cut-offs, spelled it out for me. This was a man who had labored long and hard, not in the gym, but in cargo ships, maybe, or in factories.

Gerry looked freakish, actually. His face was as old as a World War II veteran’s, bearing all the coarse lines and deep marks of battle. But his body seemed ageless, perfected by the forces of nature. And of poverty, my boyfriend always added.

***

Don surprised us with a visit one night, just last year. Yes, exactly a year ago this month. My boyfriend and I were already living in the subdivision close to the campus, so far away it seemed, in atmosphere though not in distance, from the Scout Area. Our little house was carefully furnished – everything in it was relatively new and bespoke our current states. We had stripped it off of any trace of its previous occupants. Each of the original concrete tiles had been plucked out and replaced with wooden floorboards. The off-white walls were repainted in ochre and tan. A floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall bookshelf was installed in the area where a television set obviously used to stand.

It was a Friday night, I remember. We were entertaining guests, colleagues from the University. It was a particularly cool and windy summer night. The doorbell had rung, just once, and I ran to get it, thinking it was the pizza delivery.

From the doorframe I saw only the silhouette of a tall, fat man, standing awkwardly by the gate, shifting his heavy weight from one foot to the other. Pizza Hut? I called out. It’s Don, he replied, in a level tone, devoid of all inflection and emotion, that I almost missed it. What? Who? It’s Don, he said in an even lower voice. Oh my god. I ran to the gate to open it, to let him in. Come in, come in, Don! He didn’t want to come in. We had guests, he noted. And he couldn’t stay long anyway.

We sat out in the veranda, looking at what few stars we could see instead. He had just come straight from the airport. He was going to be in Manila for only two days and then he was flying to Taiwan.

Taiwan?! Wow. Are you going to study there? Did you get a scholarship? I asked him. Why Taiwan?

To work, not to study. In an electronics factory. Production line. The factory supplies hardware. Minor parts. To Apple Computers. He said, reciting the information in a robotic litany.

That’s good, that’s good, I said. After that you can take that exam you’ve always wanted to take.

It’s been so long, Don, what else have you been up to? I asked, attempting to break the silence.

Tried to… hang myself. In my mother’s old house. He said, looking down at his hands, resting on his lap.

What? Don! Why?

Brought the entire ceiling. Down. With me. Too heavy. Mother was so mad. He said, smiling briefly, looking away.

What? Oh, Don. I clutched at his hand. But he pulled it away, and stood up to go.

When he bent down to kiss my cheek, I caught his eyes. They were clear, and dry, and kind of dead.

Take care, Don, I somehow managed.

In bed with my boyfriend, I sometimes think of Don’s lifeless eyes, of Gerry’s dead body, my brother’s inert anger at himself, and the crazy pregnant rat that had remained a phantom that whole summer of 2002. The summer of our discontent, as my boyfriend now jokingly refers to it.

I do not know what to make of it. I was certainly happy before and during certain parts of that summer. But, what happened since? How did it end so tragically? How did it all go wrong like that? Why did we survive and they didn’t? I ask my boyfriend these, every now and then.

What the hell was I thinking? Why did I leave home, nga ba? I had become a liar. I had either become too happy or too bored. I had either been in denial or had become a prophet. I clearly knew, but pretended not to see, what was before me.

I stop again in the middle of sex. I jump from bed, catching my boyfriend by surprise. Oh fuck, oh man, he says.

I pace from one corner of the room to another, naked, while he lies there in his discomfort, in his discontent, watching me.

It was true happiness! That was what it was! We had family then, and dogs, a car, a real home, with real rats! We had mountains and fields for a bedroom view, three minutes to the beach, small coffee shops, real conversations, with real friends, drinking at night along Magsaysay, passing out in the amphitheater, diving naked into the sea! All those out of town trips, the endless laughter, the guitar music, the loud singing! And I said no to all of it?! What the hell was I thinking?!

I realize that I am shouting like a crazy woman, so I lower my voice.

Why did we leave? Why did we come back here?

He does not answer.

I stop pacing. I stand by the window. There is a rare summer breeze. It blows the curtains to one side, but from our window there is not enough view of the night sky. I see billboards instead, the pale light of a street lamp casting strange shapeless shadows on the wall.

We were not ready for paradise just yet? He offers.

And they were ready but did not deserve it? Is that what you mean?! Fuck you! And, and how could you have witnessed it all and remain like that?

Like what, love?

Like that! Whole!

He shakes his head. I know he is trying to understand, but he doesn’t. Maybe I don’t, either.

He gets up from bed. Let’s go home, let’s get married, he says.

He stands behind me, pulls me softly into the hollow of his chest. And then does his earnest to make me forget. But I know that the pregnant rat is still there, trapped under our bed.

random studies: singapore (2)

2009-05-25T09:56:00.000-07:00

while waiting for a cab, i saw two young, attractive men in office suits, taking off their footwear before entering the gates of the temple. in a few minutes, they exited through the right wing of the main structure, looking so grave, i almost didn't recognize them. i saw them approaching what to me looked like a trash bin. but then they started addressing the thing, furiously spitting out what seemed to me to be really vicious curses, while they violently cast stones, or something hard and unwieldy, against the sides of the tin drum. after a few minutes, they calmed down, wiped off the sweat covering their faces, and went back into the temple perhaps to say a few more prayers. then, they emerged from the gates, stepped into their shoes, and merged with the crowd.

random studies: singapore

2009-05-20T01:40:00.000-07:00

(just for the sake of having something to blog about)

there is a beautiful hindu temple right next to the hotel, just before you reach the park and the bus stop on pearl hill. when i arrived, last sunday, there were so many birds, many, many birds, black ones with yellow beaks, flying around the spires, and crapping at the beautiful gods and goddesses!

***
the jealousy of the older,although also extremely striking, chinese woman was so apparent when she was faced with a much younger version of herself, whose world still looms large and unexplored in front of her. it was a rather disturbing sensation, seeing how the emotion was so plain and open, and almost raw, across the older chinese woman's face. all of a sudden, the lines around her eyes became visible, her deep brown irises dulled. almost from out of nowhere, and rather comically, an awkward bony hand went up to her hair to fluff it out and and pat it into place, fluff it out and then pat it into place again, and again.

***
oh, but the change in light and atmosphere here is so subtle as to be dramatic: within the hour a cool breeze starts to blow from the south; the light softens and spreads out evenly, casting a sheer cream-colored veil of incandescence over people's faces.

Home is so sad...

2009-04-25T14:36:00.000-07:00

HOME IS SO SAD

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

(Philip Larkin in The New York Review of Books, Volume 2, Number 9 )

My Easter offering

2009-04-08T00:47:00.000-07:00

The boat from Sabah

Exactly three in the afternoon, the hour of great mercy, someone announced wryly, when I asked for the time. We arrived at the Zamboanga City port area in a gleaming, cream-colored, Toyota Altis, looking ridiculously conspicuous and unsure of ourselves. We told the driver to take shade, hide a little. He parked the car closest to the wall, but within full view of the area of water where the boat was supposed to dock. To our left, we could see the façade of the gothic Bureau of Customs and Immigrations building – its grand pointed arches, rib vaults, flying buttresses, large windows and elaborate tracery providing a stark contrast to the tableau of poverty in front of it. We stayed in the car, hesitant to go out into the scorching hot afternoon, hesitant to confront what we had come all the way to this dramatically stunning but perpetually troubled region for.

The boat from Sabah had not yet arrived, we were told. An opening, however, had already been cleared between a passenger vessel and a domestic cargo ship. Military jeeps, police mobiles, two ambulance units, and an International Committee of the Red Cross wagon were also already in front of the docks. Immigration police in their green fatigues, and Red Cross volunteers in bright red shirts, took advantage of the shade offered by the swaying shadow of the big Basilan-bound passenger boat that was rocking softly in the waters, loading its passengers: women with their children bound to the sides of their waists, and men carrying on their shoulders colorful plastic bags fashioned into shapes of suitcases.

There was a palpable buzz. The atmosphere at the pier was almost festive. Comfortable, at the very least. There was a relaxed camaraderie and unspoken accord among the people waiting: government workers, local and international volunteers, advocacy groups, the police, the curious, and the cargadores.

Meanwhile, our guide, a young, vivacious nurse working with the Department of Health and the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine, gave us instructions. We were to follow her and say “From the DOH”. That was all. Nothing more.

But we had many other questions: about the boat carrying the undocumented Filipinos who had been expelled from Sabah, about that place which doesn’t want them but which most of these people consider as home, about these people whose notion of country and nation are unlike our own, whose allegiances are created by wherever there is for them a family and a means to live.

The boat from Sabah, our guide said, is a big one with three main sections. It regularly plies the Sabah-Zamboanga route. It is not at all like a prison boat, she said. The first two levels are occupied by paying passengers. A metal latch-door separates them from the passengers of the boat’s topmost section. This section is reserved for the Halaw – the expelled, the rejected, the ones who have been discarded – as the deportees are referred to in the local Tausug language.

Our guide told us that the number of Halaw varies, depending on the Malaysian government’s schedule of deportation. There is what is called a massive deportation with hundreds to thousands of undocumented Filipinos shipped back to Zamboanga every week. On a regular basis, for the so-called regular deportation, the boat from Sabah comes twice a week, Wednesdays and Saturdays, and the deportees number from fifty to two hundred per trip. The Malaysian government arranges and pays for the cost of deportation. She said that the people are probably given some food for the trip, too. But most of them have been in detention centers for months that apart from their travel documents, they do not have much else – not the money they worked for, or the families they live for – when they land in our shores. Some of them, because of prolonged detention, lose their minds, their memories, and their names as well. The most unfortunate ones lose their lives.

According to DSWD records, there has been a rising number of deaths from among the deportees. Infants almost always do not survive the trip. Even the adults, the very sick ones, the severely malnourished, also eventually succumb to death despite efforts to treat and rehabilitate them. Ironic, our guide said, that they should survive harsh conditions in detention, in sea transport, only to die when they are freed on land.

It had been almost half an hour already, and the afternoon was getting hotter, I started seeing mirages everywhere. The glare of the sun was so fierce that the skies, the sea, everything looked white. The blaze outshone the sparkling white sand of the islands in the horizon and we could only see a wide strip of wobbly, wavering, shimmering light from across the sea. The mountains and islands of Basilan had disappeared. No approaching boats could be seen.

In a few more minutes, though, about a dozen Badjao bancas started to float into our vision. Our guide told us that the Badjaos usually meet the big boats on their bancas, to beg for coins to be thrown into the water, to exhibit their magnificent diving skills to the spectator-passengers. The entourage of bancas was a sign that a big passenger boat was approaching. We then got off the car and told the driver to head back to the hotel and to wait for our call.

The heat rising from the ground and striking from above accosted us promptly. I swayed a little and had to take deep breaths to steady myself, before I could join my friend and our guide who had started to walk ahead of me toward the docks. As we were walking, the boat from Sabah came into view, spewing out two cones of thick black smoke into the air. The entourage of Badjao bancas u-turned in what looked like a choreographed move, and then they arranged themselves with a theatrical sense of blocking along the boat’s portside. The boat passengers packed themselves to this side of the boat, leaning against the rails, shouting, applauding, and waving at the kids on the bancas. A few coins glimmered momentarily as these were tossed up in the air and into the sea. The Badjao kids dove swiftly after the coins underwater.

The boat continued to move slowly toward the docks, heavily tilted to one side. I feared it would spill the people over to the water altogether. My heart palpitated in excitement, in anticipation, in anxiety, as the boat neared the pier and its anchor was thrown to the wharf.

At the wharf, the inter-agency team that had come to meet the deportees started to move as well. They pulled themselves from what were earlier relaxed, comfortable poses – leaning against cars, crouched under the shadows – and composed themselves into bodies poised for action. They accorded us with slight disinterest, polite disregard as they took their positions. “From the DOH”, we said, even when nobody bothered to ask.

The smell, the heat, the noise that met us as soon as we stepped into the cargo section of the boat were more than sufficient warning of what we were to witness.

Immigration officers filed past us, followed by the quarantine team, and the social welfare coordinator, who made their way to a room next to the captain’s cabin. All passengers had to pass and get their travel documents stamped in this room before they could be allowed to leave the boat.

I tried to catch up with everyone, slightly fearful of the estivadores who communicated mainly by shouting and routinely spewing colorful curses in Chavacano, as they unloaded cargo from the ship. I tried even harder not to stare up at the passengers of the topmost section and the panicked, anxious look in their eyes. Their cheeks were sunken, their jaws stood out, their skin had boils and spots. They leaned over the rails, peeked through the metal latch-door, and watched us, not making any move, not making any sound. The rubber soles of my shoes kept sticking to the greasy surface of the metal floor and made embarrassing sucking noises the faster I walked.

In the holding room, a young female nurse who had escorted the deportees was already briefing the team. There were 261 deportees in all. At least eight of them were in emergency medical conditions, and should be rushed to the hospital as soon as possible. But there were also some newborns, infants, and a couple of other children who had to be loaded off the boat first. There was an outbreak of some kind of pox, too. Most of the passengers had already caught it.

After the briefing, we made our way to the topmost section of the boat. The latch-door was pulled and we climbed briskly up the metal stairs. When we were safely inside, the door was closed again behind us with a loud clang that reverberated throughout the floor of the Halaw section.

There were too many bunk beds, there was hardly any space to navigate between them. The light was blocked, the air was stale, and then some of the deportees started to smoke. The smell of tobacco blended with that of unwashed bodies, grease on the steel bed frames, leftover food in the bins, and sweat on the blankets.

There was a slight confusion before we were able to locate the deportees in need of emergency medical assistance. Everybody had the same exhausted, but anxious look about them. Everybody looked in need of medical attention. And then we spotted them, the patients. Their limbs had shrunk, but their heels and feet had swollen to unimaginable shapes. This was the main, the most common complaint. They couldn’t move their legs. They couldn’t feel anything anymore. They had been sitting for too long – three, five, six months long. They were very rarely allowed to stand or to walk. They could only sit on their heels or lie on their backs. Two of them had tried to stand, they both got struck by a cane behind the knee and were forced to sit. So they did. They sat. They sat for too long.

Disuse atrophy of the most severe type, the nurses said. This occurs when there is an injury to, or disease of a nerve, or even from total lack of physical exercise, from not using the muscles enough. Considering that these people were manual laborers, the injury and utter lack of mobility they had been subjected to must have been pretty harsh, our guide said. She wasn’t sure if this would be reversed with vigorous exercise or better nutrition. She wasn’t even sure if it was just muscle atrophy that was the problem. She also suspected kidney failure, due to dehydration and a variety of insults to the body. This, she said, is fast becoming a common cause of mortality among deportees.

Six women went mad all at the same time in one cell, a young male deportee narrated. No, they didn’t go mad, their bodies were inhabited by demon spirits, sinaniban, explained another, a much older Muslim man. These women had grown so thin, had wild looks in their eyes. They howled, tore off their clothes, tried to attack the other women in the cell, they said. Good thing an Imam was around. He exorcised the demon spirits from the women’s bodies and insisted that the women be transferred to another room. The women’s chamber was a pretty bad section of the detention center, they all agreed. It was only when the women were transferred to another cell that they went back to their normal selves, that they recovered their human bodies, the men said. They shook their heads of the memory, of the sight of those women. Pinaka-kawawa talaga yung mga babae. The women really have it worst, said these male Muslim deportees, with such sadness, such anger, such sympathy. It was difficult to conceive of them as terrorists, insurgents, criminals, as they have often been referred to in the newspapers here and in Sabah.

There weren’t enough stretchers, it turned out. One of the patients had to be carried on the back of his brother who was only just strong enough to lift the patient, off the bunk and on to his back. The patient was too tall, his limbs fell limply along the sides of his brother’s body; his bare, swollen, heavy feet scraped the metal floor as his brother crouched low and lugged the patient’s body heavily along.

Then the boat started to move, the men panicked. Where are we being taken? What’s going to happen to us? My heart leaped, too. I tried not to panic. Probably just positioning the boat more closely to where the ambulances are, I said. But, why is the boat moving away from the pier? Why is it leaving the dock?! Was there something wrong with our papers? And, then, finally, the question was asked with much fear and trepidation: Are we being taken back to Sabah?

When the boat stopped, the deportees started moving frantically toward the door, eager to leave this section, eager to get off the boat. This created a commotion that proved difficult to control. Some of the patients had to be settled back on the bunk beds, to let the other passengers out first. Two men had decided to wait it out calmly and proceeded to light cigarettes instead. They had been through this before, they said. One of them had been deported thrice already, the other twice. They exit through Taw-tawi, they said. No sweat. It is very easy. In Sabah, they know someone who can produce fake IDs. You want one? They offered. No sweat, mam. It really is very easy. They insisted.

I decided to sit with one of the patients who had been asked to stay behind. There didn’t seem to be anything particularly alarming about his condition, although there was a gangrenous wound on his elbow. A red band was tied tightly right above it. What caught attention was that he spoke English, and only English. His eyes darted from one corner of the boat to another. He couldn’t look straight at any one point longer than a few seconds. When his eyes rested on me, piercingly, although for only a very brief moment, my heart tightened instantly with fear. I hated myself for it. Then he looked away and offered his right hand for a shake. It took me a while to realize that he had introduced himself. His hand was furrowed, bony, dark, and small. The back of his palm was also spotted with what looked like boils. I took his hand and shook it very lightly in mine.

I only realized that I had been holding my hand out, very awkwardly, in the air, like I was trying to dry it, when someone asked me if there was something wrong with it. I shook my head furiously, mumbled something indistinct, and hid my hand behind my back.

It had been almost four hours since the boat from Sabah had docked. We had already arrived at the Center for Displaced Persons. The deportees had been loaded off the fleet of six-wheeler trucks that had brought them to their temporary home in Zamboanga, from the pier. They had also already been oriented of their new status and situation, and had been formally welcomed to the Philippines. They were now lining up in front of a makeshift eating area for their first hot meal, since they left Sabah. All around them, the neighborhood kids were clapping their hands, welcoming them, and cheering: Halaw! Halaw! Halaw! Shouting out that derogatory term, which everyone seemed to have embraced and turned into something endearing instead.

You are now in the Philippines, you are now free, the Center Head had told them. When it was translated to Bahasa Malay, some shed tears involuntarily, but very, very quietly. When they were told that they may now stand and start making their way out of the hall and into the eating area, the silence was broken by the sighs of relief, and the shuffle of feet, of some two hundred fifty three hungry people, who had sat for far too long in a place they used to call home.

We didn’t speak to each other, my friend and I, while we were in the car, on our way back to the hotel. Zamboanga looked even more intriguing in the deep blue of a March summer evening. All around us, the city had turned on its lights, the streets were filled with cars. Elsewhere, parking lots were full, side streets were blocked. It was a Saturday night, after all. And the place is known for some real good nightlife. The visiting American forces sometimes leave their camps and risk their safety for this nightlife.

We turned all our attention to the driver, as we crawled down Zamboanga’s city streets, in search of some mangosteen and other fruits in season, to bring back to Manila the next day. We asked about his family, we joked with him, we made him laugh, and we laughed much too loudly for his comfort. But, my friend and I, we were comfortable only in this kind of gaiety, so we kept at it.

Then we passed the boulevard, which was lined with lovers and groups of friends out for some simple, inexpensive fun. From the boulevard, we could almost see the boat decked in lights, lolling softly in the water, waiting for passengers for the return trip to Sabah. We fell silent all the way back to the hotel.

At the hotel, we let each other take as much time as we felt we needed in the shower. When it was my turn, I turned the shower knob to full heat, and let the hot water scald my skin. I opened my palms, scrubbed soap several times on them, and held them up, to cup as much hot water as they could take until they hurt, until they seriously started to hurt.

Out in the hotel balcony, while we smoked, we could almost hear the boat’s droning call, the single continuous note, vibrating through the air. We listened in silence, both of us perhaps wondering, how many of those passengers bound for Sabah would be expelled right back to this very same place with their dreams, their spirits, and their limbs broken. (revised, april 2009)

a generation continues to pass

2009-03-30T20:33:00.000-07:00

an uncle died singing. he had sung a total of three songs before he heaved his last breath and collapsed on a chair. the time was one-thirty in the afternoon. the sun was high. the heat seeped into people’s bones. tuba warmed their blood even more. a man’s ninth death anniversary was being celebrated. another man’s life in that party ended. it ended on a high note.

a most intent spectator

2009-03-15T09:34:00.000-07:00

is what i've been these last few weeks. it is like living in high drama. it has its lows. the little crashes after the peak are unbearable,too. as R___ says, what to do, what to do with all these feelings? so many things. puede rin nothing.

so many ways of responding. you want to remember everything as they were. you want to remember you as you were. how? how to do it?

these are what i plan/want to do:

1. stalk the Ballet Philippines' resident choreographer, Alden Lugnasin (who i've talked to before and did an article on a long time ago). understand what it really takes for him to create a piece. what each movement means. what the dance does to him. how he lives his life and how it is expanded by dance. i dream of a documentary as a final output. i imagine a really intense conversation. hay.

2. do a critique of the costume design and makeup in Max Luna III's "KatiTaog" -- a rumination on the properties of water -- and arrive at an understanding of why the women had to have an aztec look about them, even if the piece is heavily based on "Pangalay".

3. do a study of the woman as subject, or subject as woman, in Alce Reyes's "Amada".

4. write about the ideology of melancholia and the forces of production in relation to the eheads concert.

5. do nothing. move on t the next spectacle. really.

what i want to do

2009-02-20T23:57:00.000-08:00

when i grow up:

The Mechanics of Loss

2009-01-05T08:44:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it will feel as though you are on television. What with the candlelights, the house filled with flowers, and velvet curtains in the backdrop. You will glow. You will be radiant. You will look absolutely tragic, delicate, and beautiful. Everyone will feel sorry for you. Everyone will want to be you. Even you will want to be you. The weight loss will be amazing: sunken cheeks, hollow eyes, thin limbs. The effort at cheerfulness, the ironic retorts, the entertaining anecdotes will naturally be underlined with sadness, which you will try to hide, of course, but which they will see anyway. The sight of you will soften the hardest of hearts, will move even your enemies to tears.

At some point, however, you will start to want to feel some real pain. And it will come when there is no one to see it. Then you will be truly helpless and vulnerable. Be careful: there is much too many negative lay literature on dealing with loss out there. You will want to read them all, because you will understand and believe them all. Know what to ignore. Know what’s useful. It mostly has to do with culture, you know. Various cultures deal with it in varying ways. All of which will be wrong. All of which will be worth trying. The absence is permanent, after all. You have all the time in the world.

The truth is that it takes a while. It happens while you are walking back to your apartment, one windy January afternoon, when the sunlight is so soft, it falls in various colors and in many wonderful ways, on pavements, on footbridges, on roofs of cars. The fall and spread of light is almost like a choreographed Christmas dance, or like music made visual, making the city streets kinder, the buildings and people’s houses friendlier, the strangers’ faces not so strange at all. But you know that none of this is real anyway, so you walk on. It can happen when you arrive in your empty, quiet, clean apartment, and you open the glass door that leads to a sparse garden outside, to let last night’s smell of cigarette smoke out, but the sound of a choir of birds will so surprise you, and make you forget you are in the middle of a dense, dirty city, so far from home and everyone you love. You will forget that it is only three in the afternoon, the middle of workweek; all of this will make you want to fix yourself up a tall glass of rum and soda, play some old Sunday music. You know there is something artificial about all of this natural light, this natural beauty, and then that’s when it’s going to start, but you will heave it off very deeply, and insist on putting your feet up and staring lovingly at the trees anyway. It also happens while you are having breakfast with your favorite cousin and you are laughing over old family jokes, and there is a very brief pause, the sound of your forks lightly scratching the plates will be so magnified, drinking up the glass of water will only choke you, dear. It is very possible that even while you’re in a strange country, pondering foreign faces, none of which possesses a single familiar trait, a smile, a sigh, a flip of the hair by the well-dressed, middle-aged woman across from you on the train will do it. While in a conference, the smell of the artificially cooled air will be so familiar, harmless, impersonal, but also very distinct it will finally bring tears to your eyes.

Of course, it will often be shameful, because random. Then you will know that this is what it truly means. It really is just control that you lose. Your memory is on the loose, your body is not yours, your mind has splintered into so many sectors, a different voice has taken up residence in each. This is when you sometimes really lose it. And this is also when, sometimes, you will be grateful for losing it, because it will be easier. You understand now how some people cannot go back to how they were. And, perhaps, this is the real loss: no longer having that right, that capacity, or that grace to go back. And forth. Being denied that instinctive mental movement which we used to take for granted.

Understand that this is the mechanics of loss, and it also explains in part the mechanics that bind: children to their parents, and parents to their children, in this enormous circle of pain that underlines love and life, and giving, and taking; of birth, and death, and growing, and necessarily feeling.

There’s nothing else to do but stand and excuse yourself. Personal necessity, you can always say. Walk straight to the washroom then, and do it. Do it wholeheartedly, do it soundlessly. In the stark, cold, windowless space of this white, tiled room, in the middle of nowhere.

There will be many, many more such rooms. And, the truth is, it will take a while to understand it, to lose it, to live with it.

fellows, panelists

2008-12-07T10:58:00.000-08:00

Link

Fiction as allegiance.

2008-12-06T18:51:00.000-08:00

And an allegation.
(paper presented at the UP centennial writers' conference/workshop
at UP Visayas-Tacloban College, Dec. 1-6, 2008)

The burden of representation
As an avid reader and an amateur critic of fiction, I have found that, inevitably, dealing with fiction entails getting to a certain level of inquiry that also, inevitably, leads to one of only two results. One is what Pierre Macherey has termed as the breaking down of the story before questions it is incapable of answering, the other is my breaking down as a reader before a story I am incapable of questioning.

This is hardly unusual. I know that I am not alone in this reading practice or experience. Instead of just asking who the characters are in a story, we ask, for instance: Whose story is this, really? Is it a good/fair/innovative way of rendering these people’s lives? Is this a sound depiction of the subject him/herself? Instead of asking what the story is all about, we ask: What, ultimately, is the story saying about stories, about history, about time? Is this a sensitive rendering of a society, a culture, a social relationship, an event, a phenomenon? Instead of merely asking what the writer wants to say, we ask: What does this say about the writer? Whose interests does the writer serve? Or, even, what does this story want from me as a reader?

These questions, of course, point to concerns that are usually considered as being well beyond the pale of craft, way outside the parameters of form. I cannot disagree more. For sure, these are questions that delve into issues of ideology, representation, language and subjectivity, questions that the creative writer, as it is stressed in workshops time and time again, need not burden herself with. But these are concerns I burden myself with only because I have found that they cannot be disassociated with issues of form. No less than an appreciation of all these other aspects is demanded by fiction itself; and by narratives, in general, primarily because of its very nature, its very form.

My preferred definition of fiction is that which takes into consideration its form and the conditions that give rise to, sustain, or break, the form. Variations of this definition appear in the works of Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Macherey, even Haydn White. Resil Mojares’s work in The Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel also comes to mind. So do the women’s stories in the anthology Fern Garden, edited by Merlie Alunan. Moreover, the stories of Eric Gamalinda, Erwin Castillo, Nick Joaquin, Chari Lucero, Gina Apostol, among others, illustrate the definition further. Their stories celebrate the form, question the boundaries between the mimetic and the marvelous and, in the process, engage quite intensely with the stories’ material and historical conditions. I pay much attention to these aspects because what, as a reader, I demand from (and enjoy about) fiction, are no different from what I, as a writer of it, aspire for. Similarly, the things I am dissatisfied with in some works of fiction are the very same things I want to avoid in my own writing -- monologism, univocalism, and objectivism. Kind of like the traits of this government which I also cannot stand.

I do tend to agree with the idea that fiction is necessarily burdened with issues of representation – not only in the sense of Greek Classical representation as the reproduction of something, or the elaboration of a concept corresponding to a thing perceived; but also in the sense of political, everyday representation as in formal statements made to a higher authority. Representation as the communication of an opinion, or the registration of a protest! More and more, I am seduced by the idea of fiction as a claim, a contention and, sometimes, an allegation.

(I must say that I love the word allegation. Used appropriately, it can be an effective way of stating one’s belief by merely citing the plausible opposite. The exercise of alleging can be an immensely successful way of rendering the tyranny of truth as irrelevant or, at least, relative, conditional. Allegation is a very powerful legal fiction, so to speak.)

I remember a critic from New Zealand, enthusiastically presenting a paper on one of Jessica Hagedorn’s novels, in a literary conference in UP. The critic went on to praise the novel’s style and evocative language, only to be severely critiqued right after. The poor guy did not know what hit him. What more do you want, I’m sure he wanted to ask. Here I am, telling you that I love this novel, by a Filipino writer, about the Philippines, and you complain! What the critic did not anticipate was the ultra sensitivity of the audience – literature teachers, writers, and critics all – to issues of representation. The guy was severely berated for not having recognized that the reading he just offered had long been rendered inoperable, narrow-minded, and generally unsound. His only fault: to praise the book for the wrong claims; and to claim an understanding of the state of the nation, merely through the book. What really struck the audience’s nerve was that this one particular novel by a Fil-am writer was being read by a foreigner as a representation of the entire Philippines. On the contrary, readings of it in Comparative Literature classrooms have tended to treat the novel as being quite unabashedly intended for a foreign audience, and its postmodernist tendencies merely serve to mask the novel’s ideology. At some point, I remember thinking: Well, why the hell not? Why can’t one write for the audience one wants? Would it have made a difference if the author were not a Fil-American, if she were just a Filipino? Would it have made a difference if she wrote about America, instead of the Philippines, and applied the same techniques and strategies?

Apparently, yes, one can and does write for one’s ideal reader. However, one has to always account for one’s subject position, which is revealed by the mere choice of readership. And, nowadays, yes, it does make a difference who you’re writing as, what you’re writing about, and where you’re writing from.

I have my own reading of the novel, and I do tend to go with the postcolonial critique of ideology approach. I submit though that, to a certain extent, the engagement with critical theory – particularly of these kinds – can get out of hand, get in the way of pure reading pleasure. Not to mention how it can get in the way of pure fiction-writing pleasure.

Theory indeed gets in the way. But, isn’t it only right that it should? The complexity of the world we write of and the world we write in demands that it be rendered sensitively and, well, honestly. Whether one writes of a world of simple peasants in the distant Philippine past, or the underground world of punk-gothic individuals in dizzyingly fast-paced urban New Manila, one is still writing of the here and now. One has to, in a sense, theorize the world one writes in, through the fictionalized world one writes of.

All I mean is, there is no turning back, no reclaiming lost innocence, no feigning indifference. One can no longer unread what one has read. There are pressures and demands on the writing and reading of Philippine fiction, in English, at least, that cannot, and should not, be ignored.

Home as a syndrome
As a writer from the Visayas, who is based in Manila, for instance, I cannot help but react, sometimes violently, to pressures for a particular kind of representation in my fiction. I’m sure this is a familiar experience to many. For instance, in national writers workshops, it is almost always expected of us to turn out a story with a strong, local flavor, but rendered from an ironic perspective. I mean, if you merely translate into English a perfectly sensible and successful oral narrative in Waray, for instance, it would surely be considered too simplistic, unimaginative, a failure. But, really, what does local color mean? Does this mean including snippets of conversation, expletives and curses, in the local language for emotional color? Does it involve using Waray terms, written in italics, even for phrases that have an idiomatic equivalent in English? Does this mean writing about rural folks, in idyllic seaside settings, engaging in so-called native – therefore humorous, strange, or fantastic – practices? Because I am very much guilty of all that, of submitting to such pressures and demands. What’s even more unfortunate is that these are pressures I myself exert on my own writing, almost as a matter of course.

The truth is, it is only on occasions like this that I am forced to confront questions that sometimes do spoil the pleasure of writing fiction. Most of the time, I just write what I can, whenever I can. I still believe that a writer’s role is to write. I cannot use the excuse of engaging with theory as a reason for not being able to produce fiction. Neither do I see theory as an impetus to write fiction. I do not write fiction in order to illustrate a theory. I do not write fiction in order to save the country, to improve people’s lives, or to empower the marginalized. There are other activities, other kinds of writing, that I do that, to my mind, would more closely approach those objectives. As a fictionist, my first allegiance is to the story, to memory, to play. My fiction, moreover, aims to play with the concept of fiction itself, with the concept of allegiance even, as well as of memory and remembrance.

My stories have invariably been about home – home as a syndrome, a physiological disorder: a disruption of normal physical or mental functions; a disease or an abnormal condition. The body is in one place, but the heart is someplace else. The language that is used for speech is not the language of one’s secrets. This is the main affliction, an affliction whose symptoms are not always manifest, rather latent. In my stories, the characters are always engaged with and yet distanced from home; but they never really leave it, they bring it with them wherever they go. The struggle is to accept that home is a concept, and a floating, unstable one, too. The struggle is to broaden the concept in order to encompass one’s changing conditions, one’s mobile location, one’s shifting position. The struggle is to not make everyone notice that the character is not always there; that she is, in truth, some place else; that she has actually disappeared, has established her home in the deepest recesses of her mind, a place beyond anyone’s reach.

I remember how, as a child growing up always amidst some twenty other cousins, in a small family compound here in Tacloban, or in Barugo, or Matalom, or Cebu, during the summer, I was always trying to disappear, and it was quite easy to disappear. I did it several times. I simply slipped out of the group of cousins playing out in the yard, to go back up to the house, hide in the room, go through my mother’s bags, rifle through my father’s documents, open cabinets and drawers, climb atop kitchen counters, mix up and blend condiments, write and draw figures on walls, dress and make up the saints, all the while unnoticed and unmissed. This went on for quite some time until one afternoon, when I decided to hide behind the backdoor of my grandparents’ house in Tacloban, to blend with the brooms and mops and cobwebs and dust, for about twelve hours, they say. I stood there without making any movement or sound, watching the maids, some aunts and cousins, go in and out of the house. I remember how I maintained my position even when my cousins and, eventually, the adults started looking for me. I could clearly hear and see people combing the entire house, the entire compound, looking everywhere but behind the backdoor. I stood there even when I could see my mother starting to panic and to blame hapless househelps for my disappearance. I do not, however, for the life of me, remember why I did what I did, or what was going through my mind while I stood there, very, very, very still. Neither do I know what made me step out of the dark, privileged, corner behind the door, in order to blend, inevitably, with the rest of them.

Since then, I don’t think I have been able to hide and disappear without anyone noticing. I did not mind becoming more visible only because I eventually realized that that was actually the best way to obscurity; an obscurity which served my need to observe, to create worlds within a world, story after story.

My head was always filled with stories – real and fabricated, my own and others’, for good and for bad. I think it was my father who first had the inkling that I would one day venture into writing stories, if not jokes. I think the very first time I understood what it took to make people laugh was also the time I understood how language works. I remember that it was one of those evenings, after dinner, the adults were out in the veranda, smoking, having coffee, airing themselves out. I sat next to Tatay and said, in Waray: Let’s say your name is You and my name is Me. Now answer this question: Who is the crazy one between the two of us? Tatay laughed so hard, I was instantly pleased, even if I didn’t have the foggiest idea why he found it so funny. I wasn’t trying to be funny, I don’t even think the idea for what was apparently a joke, was my original. For a while there, I was a major hit. Everyone started telling and retelling my joke, it became deeply embarrassing, especially because I was the last to actually get it. When I finally did get it, I tried formulating similar quips, a few of which elicited a wan response, none of which quite achieved the same kind of sweeping success that the first joke elicited. Until today, I am still trying.

There is nothing special about the stories I write. There is nothing special about me as a writer of stories. Everyone in my family is either a storyteller or a politician, which is basically saying that they are all fictionists. A few of them actually became highly successful writers and many became spectacularly unsuccessful politicians. My point is simply to say that the simple question of why I write has an equally simple answer: given that there have only been two fates, I think I’d rather be a failed writer than a failed politician. As for why I write the way I do and for whom I write, I think it is clear to me now: I write to please those from whom my fiction is derived. This is my fiction, my audacious allegation. Whether or not I actually do please them, can be the subject of another forum, for another time.

Speculative Non Fiction

2008-11-07T04:08:00.000-08:00

That, according to my friend Carl, is the kind of writing that I do. Fancy term for LIES, and FABRICATIONS, really. =)

Watch for his upcoming collection of essays and stories.

CSF: creative semi-fiction

2008-09-24T02:09:00.000-07:00

Sad, as in “also”

My mother would have been sixty today. She was born in 1948 in a town called Matalom, in the southern part of Leyte. Stories have it that when my mother was young, she would often get ill, suffer strange, undiagnosed, incurable symptoms, the only remedy for which was to bring her back to the town where she was born. At the time, it took almost an entire day to travel from Tacloban, where their family eventually settled, to Matalom, which they visited only once every year, or depending on how often my mother became ill.

My mother had six brothers and sisters, but she was the only one who was born in Matalom, her mother’s hometown. This, her siblings used to say, explains why she took after their mother the most. And, they would always add, also the reason why she took after their mother in the worst ways possible; that is, in terms of mood and disposition.

I never really knew their mother; hence, I find it difficult to relate to her, to even refer to her as grandmother. But, I shall try. Their mother, A___, was a tall, buxom woman, with a polished look about her. In the photographs hanging on the walls of the old house in Matalom and in Tacloban, she is always the tallest among everyone, man or woman, and she always carries herself with a combination of grace and ease; with a skilled, concise execution, which can only be described as stylish in a military way. Most people, however, thought that she was, on the whole, in look and manner, rather severe. Again, I have no direct, personal recollection of her severity or grace. I also do not recall any story about her being demonstrative in her care and affection for her children and her husband, or for anyone, for that matter.

The stories I retain of A___ are, on the whole, inconsequential: how tiny her waist was despite her full figure, how her height and her low, somber voice commanded attention, and how stubborn she was in her refusal to learn any other language but Bisaya. For some reason, people also referred to this language as Kana (the Bisaya term for “that one”, or perhaps the Bisaya pejorative for “Americana”). I have some very curious memory of that voice applied to what I thought was a peculiar language.

I also sometimes remember her smell, which was, invariably, a combination of fresh laundry and sweet-sour fruits. (This was how my mother smelled, too, on Sundays, without the scented lotion and expensive perfume).

A____ died thirteen days after I celebrated my third birthday, a month after my mother turned thirty.

***

It is always of these that my memory of that day is made up: tall men and women, in black and white, milling about, standing in corners; dark figures slumped, arms sagging against reddish-brown wooden seats. A glass is thrown violently to the deep-red, concrete floor, and stepped on by many grieving, angry feet shod in leather. A string of white rosary beads is pulled apart, and the round, tiny crystals slide swiftly off the string and scatter themselves on the floor, under the furniture, and under people’s soles. And then we are being lined up in front of the coffin, arranged according to some logic I could not understand. From being carried in someone’s arms, I am, against my will, settled on the floor next to my siblings and my cousins. My baby brother, who is only a few months old, takes my place in the coveted cradle-arms of some aunt or uncle. There is lightning in my face, and I am temporarily blind. I think it is at this point that I start to cry. But nobody sees.

Nobody hears, either. There are too many languages being spoken all at the same time. And my grandmother’s language is spoken the loudest by more voices than I have ever heard it spoken before. “Kana! Kani! Kana sad! Kani sad!” (which, I thought, translated to “That one! This one! That one is sad! This one is sad!” only to find out, very soon enough, that “sad” only meant “also”, or “too”). And the controversy had merely to do with flowers – over which ones to bring to the chapel, which ones to throw away, or burn.

Nothing of the nine-day wake should be left behind, a nameless grandaunt says emphatically. Unless you want a member of the family to follow suit, another one adds. Very quickly, it is settled. No one dares argue. Bouquets, wreaths, and vases of dried up and decaying flowers are thrown into a sack to join the pyre. Brighter, fresher ones are arranged atop a long, black hearse which, like its passengers, looks “sad sad”, as it waits there, strikingly odd in the otherwise car-less street.

The funeral took place at high noon and I remember the heat.

I cannot ignore the heat. It bears down on us as we walk in a solemn procession from the gates of the cemetery to the small clearing where there is an empty tomb and several priests waiting, their white frocks stiff in the windless air. A____ is the first to stake her claim in the family lot. Eventually, as the years would pass, that clearing would disappear, as it is crowded with more of her family members following her lead, despite the careful adherence to superstition. It becomes too crowded that it would not even accommodate my mother who, on the very day I turn thirty, would be, as some would say, “laid to rest”, away from her family.

At the burial, I cannot take my eyes off my mother’s face, as she watches the cement inevitably applied to the square opening of the gray tomb, sealing the niche (and her mother) off, finally, from the rest of the world. There are several broken flowers strewn all around us. The candles are melting quickly before the harsh heat of the sun. The kids are starting to surreptitiously gather them to form balls of wax. I am slumped against the chest of someone whose face I cannot see. I cannot stop staring at my mother’s face. There is so much going on in it. She has on an expression I have never seen before. I am looking and looking but not understanding the meaning behind it. And then it strikes me: it is almost the same expression she has after dabbing on “White Flower” liniment onto her temples and after inhaling the vapors. It is the look of someone disappearing, fading away. It is a look that is focused on something beyond my ken. It is a look that worries me no end.

***

Matalom, in Bisaya, means sharp. When I think of Matalom, on the contrary, the images are framed in soft light. In my mind, sometimes, I see the houses, the municipio, the plaza, the old church, the ancient trees, the coast and the sea beyond it, neatly arranged, in quaint stillness, underneath a layer of mist. Perhaps this is because my first vivid encounter with the place was through sleep-heavy, glazed eyes, encountering early morning sunlight coming at me in tiny broken streams, through intertwined foliage.

I probably slept through much of that first trip. I only remember that, when I woke up, the car we were in was slowing down, bringing the excited chatter to a hush. When I looked up, we were under a canopy of acacia leaves and branches that were tangled in a complex embrace. I would soon learn to treat the magical welcome arch, as a marker, an unmistakable sign, that we had entered the town proper, if not a different time zone altogether. As a matter of propriety and practice, everything slows down, therefore. In a minute, the plaza starts to loom to our right, and, to our left, the cathedral and the town’s patron saint, San Jose, facing the municipio and the country’s national hero, the other Jose.

My grandmother’s house is located on the same block as the church. Its “dirty kitchen” faces the small, square, black windows of the church rectory. When attending afternoon novena masses, we pass through the backdoor, from the kitchen, and enter the church compound via the rectory. We sometimes see the priests, off duty, strumming guitars, grooming gardens, meditating.

I have heard that, in every generation, at least one of the Tías carries on an illicit conduct with some young Pádre, in the much too short, tree-lined path between the women’s earthly kitchen and the men’s holy ground. It is probably not true, but not hard to imagine. I imagine this: A___ herself as a product of the prohibited passions between a Spanish man of the cloth and an otherwise pious native girl. A____’s mother is fourteen and he forty. She is much too tall for her age and her kind, while he is much too lay for his order and for his own good. It’s all very, very easy to imagine, in fact.

As soon as we passed the church, the driver took a quick left and there it was, the house where my mother was born. There is nothing remarkable, or imaginative, about the house, which, like all the others, looks like a girl’s dress, with concrete walls for a skirt, wooden and capiz windows for a top. The house would be quite easy to miss, save for the bougainvilleas, that climb wildly all over the front of the house, adhering brightly colored papery bracts, that persist for a long time as to be permanent, on the walls.

The car pulled up under the colorful vines. And as soon as the rusty door of the car was opened, before we kids could even get off the orange Ford Fiera, we were untangled from the arms of our yayas, lifted over bags and boxes, and ensconced in the warm hugs and kisses of a hundred Tías. Then the rest of the contingent spilled out of the car, and there were even more combinations of tearful embraces, as the decibel of “Kana! Kani!” chatter rose higher and higher.

“Kana sad! Kani sad!”

No, no one was sad, everybody was happy. They were actually just giving instructions on which bags to unload, which ones to leave behind. That was just how everybody was: nothing was ever not a cause for excitement.

In those times, many, many years ago, we only ever traveled in big, noisy, highly-excitable groups. We filled buses, or rented big vans, even if some of the families had their own private cars. The only time there would be a semblance of silence during the trip was when we passed the steep, winding roads, by the sides of mountains; the chatter would then turn to prayer. As soon as the most challenging part of the road to Matalom was passed, the adults instantly recovered: they sang cheesy songs, told tired old stories, and then passed around the miniature “White Flower” bottle, whose oil they dabbed on their temples, and the vapors they inhaled, like junkies, through their noses.

The last time I was in Matalom was with a much smaller, quieter contingent: my two brothers and two sisters, all of whom I had to baby-sit, without my knowing it. My brothers, who were the real junkies, were then both hooked on mind-altering substances and eardrum-busting sounds. My older sister was trying not to depress herself, while waiting for the results of her board exams. My baby sister was, well, still a baby at the age of twelve. We did not know the real reason for our overextended stay in Matalom, until ten days later when, despite the long distance calls to our parents, they still would not come for us or send us money for bus fare back to Tacloban. We eventually realized that hieing us off to Matalom was Mother’s idea of rehabilitation and spiritual exile for her children, as much as for herself, I suppose.

My baby sister was a mere foil, or an accessory, it turned out: for as long as she was with us, no one had the heart to pull the rug from under our feet, even when we older kids started depressing the hell out of everyone with our posturing. Everybody was charmed by my baby sister’s crystal clear singing voice, and entranced with her almost translucent complexion, not to mention the fact that she was named after my mother, decidedly their favorite among A___‘s children .

I, on the other hand, had just graduated from UP then, had no job, and was forever in black, agonizing over the fact that I could not, had no excuse to, be with my boyfriend who was a journalist in Manila. Before we arrived in Matalom, I was bent on showing everyone that this was all a waste of my time, and that I was there against my will. Of course, I was not able to maintain my position for long. Given the situation, I could not exactly complain about being forced to take a “vacation with my siblings in a seaside town, right across a white-sand resort island”, as my mother put it.

Mother literally packed us off, drove us to the terminal, and paid the bus driver who had already been instructed over the phone, to reserve the first row of seats for us, for the four-hour trip to Matalom. Against our will, she convinced us to go to Matalom at the pretext that it was a matter of obligation.

By then, most of my mother’s brothers and sisters had stopped going to Matalom, or, when they did, they would rather rent rooms at the only beach resort in town, than accept the hospitality offered by their cousins who were then caring for the house. We somehow gathered that there was some dispute over the old house beside the church, and over the land on which that house stood. Perhaps it was because my mother was born in that house that she could not let anything or anyone sway her from staying there or from maintaining ties with her mother’s sister, and her cousins.

We all noticed, moreover, that, indeed, Mother never had severe migraine attacks for the rest of the year, after being in Matalom for only a few days. She, therefore, had a well-founded reason for believing that a two-week stay in the place would cure us of our ills as well.

***

Mother was right, as always. We returned to Tacloban, after being deported to and forcefully rehabilitated in Matalom, healthy, happy, and detoxified, with new haircuts to boot. Our Tías cried, probably with as much relief as with sadness, as we waved to them from the bus. Half of the bus passengers were annoyed, the other half amused, that we had overloaded the bus with all sorts of items we accumulated in our two-week rehab-vacation in Matalom: corals, shells and stones from the beach, funky retro clothes from the ukay ukay, big jars of fiesta food, a sack of fruits, and several old photographs and stolen library books. We promised ourselves that we’d go to Matalom at least once every year, and preferably with the entire family. Even with the whole clan, just like old times!

We are still talking about going to Matalom. One of these days, one of these days, we say. Of course, it never happens. If it ever does, it would only ever be as a very small family that we would go, as it would be as a family without my mother. And, without her, I need to be convinced that we can go back to the way things were, with her siblings and their families, like in the old times, traveling together in one big happy pack.

What we never thought would happen, happened. We lost our mother; the migraines were not just migraines. The ties to her family were severed, not strengthened. And I, for my own little, insignificant part, cannot bear to be anywhere near anyone who has hurt her. My older sister, who is kind and generous, once suggested that we should reach out, be the ones to repair the damage. But I refused. I told her that I am still trying to be angry rather than hurt, at everyone who hurt but never angered our mother. For now, I am content to keep these images of my mother’s life and those who peopled it, underneath a film of vapor; content to condense everything onto paper.

I can not even enter the house in Tacloban, where mother grew up, and where we used to live for years, when my grandfather started to get sick, and until he expired. I hear the house is falling apart. The plants have died, the vines have dried up and detached themselves from the walls, and are now hanging limply like skeletons in the air. I hear the piano is missing, and can no longer be found, while the rest of the furniture have been divided senselessly among the siblings – a ten-seater dining table with only four chairs in one house, a platera without the platos in the other, an aparador without the mirror left behind.

I sometimes see unrecognizable men and women, dark sagging figures on wooden chairs, drinking tuba or cheap rum, and getting drunk in the afternoons, throwing up all over the porch, unmindful of people passing the street. I sometimes see faces, peering at the window, from behind dust-encrusted curtains. Most of the time, though, I just look away whenever I sense movement behind the curtains.

***

A____ was already dead, when I took my first trip to her hometown. Since A____’s death, my mother made it a point for us to visit Matalom as often as we could, perhaps as a way for us, her children, to know and remember A____ more. What I do remember is that as soon as we reached Matalom, everyone spoke differently. My own mother’s tongue shifted swiftly from Waray to Kana, and my poor father, who never acquired the facility for the language, was forced to speak an even more foreign language – Tagalog.

I think I only realized the import of my grandmother’s death, and a little bit of my mother’s sense of loss, when I noticed that no one spoke my grandmother’s language in the house in Tacloban. Not even my mother or her brothers and sisters spoke it, when they were in Tacloban. It was a silence that could not be ignored, especially after I had been to Matalom, where Kana was the only language spoken. And, that was when it hit me: A____was the only with that voice and that language, after all, and it was a sound that I would never ever hear, ever again.

Was this also why my mother had on that expression again, when people started speaking to her, in her mother’s tongue, when we arrived in Matalom?

One afternoon, in the old house in Matalom, while everyone was down in the sala, examining yellowed documents, and sepia photographs, I went up to A____’s room, and forced myself to cry. I dabbed on the strong mentholated liniment at the corners of my eyelids until they stung. I forced my eyes to remain open, even when they were tearing uncontrollably, so I could stare at my face in the mirror, to see how well I could imitate my mother’s expression. This was a few years after A___’s death. I don’t know how, in all those years, I had convinced myself that menthol vapor was all it would take.

A____ died when I was three, my mother thirty. My older sister was four, my younger sister had not yet been born. Of course we were all too young, my mother included, to understand what it would take to complete the numbers game: for me to reach my mother’s age when her own mother died, for my older sister to have her own three year old daughter, and for our baby sister to have to play the role of mother, in our almost-abandoned household.

***

Mother would have been sixty today. At sixty, she would have been happily retired from managing her office and would now be applying Oprah-style, positive management, self-help techniques on her husband who always obliged her, and the rest of the household who were helpless against her. At sixty, she would have been a beautiful young grandmother, and still very much a mother.

I see her through the mist: she is still relatively slim, young-looking for her age, and elegant even in her green Hawaiian-print, housedress. I see her tending the garden– or, at least, supervising someone on how to tend the plants and the vines starting to climb all over the front of our house. I see her trying, again, to change the colors of the wall, the location of the door, of our still-unfinished house, inspired by something she saw in a magazine, or in a dream about the old house in Matalom. I see her at the dining table, which she and my father sometimes liked to use as worktable. She is making “thing to do” lists, plans, inspirational prose, reminders and notes for her children, who have started their own families, and need her now more than ever. She is seated next to my father who, at the age of seventy-six, is still writing pleadings for his non-paying clients; is bent on saving other people but, without my mother, cannot function on his own. I see the two of them being torn away from their work, by the kids – not us, but our children! – who are doing something silly, looking so adorable, making a mess of Mother’s make up, breaking some jewelry, perhaps, wearing my father’s oversized leather shoes, trying to run in them, and falling all over their faces. My mother’s expression softens. This is the kind of chaos that appeals to her, and against which she has no power or a single management skill.

It is her sixtieth birthday. We have already been to church for the six a.m. mass. We are taking a trip to Matalom, A____’s hometown, the place where Mother was born. This was her idea, she made arrangements for everyone and everything. It is a beautiful day, just the right amount of sun and wind; a perfect day to travel with the entire family, indeed. And, of course, because it is my mother we are talking about, family means not only us – who are all home for the occasion—, but also friends, cousins, nieces and nephews, uncles and aunts, and grandaunts, too. Of course, she has forgiven and forgotten past misdeeds, everyone looks to her now to keep ties bound, just like they deferred to A____, her mother, to settle family matters.

Of course, too, every now and then, she remembers A_____, her own mother, who did not even live long enough to reach the age of sixty, who barely knew her grandchildren— all beautiful and bright in their own right, although some of them have to be taught how to be happy, sometimes. She cannot help but think of herself, and how she made it without A____. Has it really been three decades? Why, every time, every single time she remembers, it puzzles her that it still hurts, it still stings, no matter how long it has been. It clutches at her heart, and it induces her to fervent prayer, mindless of the three year old granddaughter who is alarmed at the change in her grandmother’s expression. Oh God, may her children never know such sorrow, may she not have to leave this little one yet, kana sad, kani sad…

It is all very, very easy to imagine, in fact.

***
My mother would have been sixty today. And I am alone in an apartment, in a house that has no history. My husband and I live and work in a noisy, wet city, whose language has adopted us. We surround ourselves with people who do not know anything about us, whom we do not know enough about. Sure, we exchange bits and pieces of ourselves, of our families, sometimes; we highlight certain events, we hide others, we mention the colorful characters, we obliterate the rest. We have degrees in language, in cultural studies, in history. We convert to discourse and fiction and poetry what we have inevitably cut ourselves from. It has become a matter of survival.

I am looking for an excuse to celebrate my mother’s life in this city that has nothing to do with her, except that this is where she died, this is where she left us. And, wherever my mother went, she did bring home with her. I am always looking for excuses to round up old friends and whatever family we can pull in from the vicinity; to gather different tongues in one table and let them speak their language, as long as never about it. Kani sad, has become a matter of survival.

Quezon City
September, 2008

today, two remarkable things

2008-08-14T19:35:00.000-07:00

happened in my classes.

in my composition class, i discovered a writer. unfortunately, i also discovered that among everyone, she had the most number of cuts and the least number of submissions. i had more than one reasons to give her an F for her advisory mark, which i have just submitted to the department, but i decided to be selfish. i decided i want to keep her in this class. but she will definitely hear it from me. as i also want to hear more from her.

in my literature class, i saw the kids mature in an hour. we were discussing the element of point of view and how it not only delimits the reader's scope of vision, controls the reader's reaction, but also reveals subjectivity and subject-position. i did not use these last two terms, or go into psychoanalytical critique, but illustrated the concepts by way of facilitating the discussion of a particular story. this is not what was remarkable about today's class. what really made my day was how smooth and steady and calm the discussion went. the students raised their hands one after the other, gave each other time to speak, listened to each other's answers and then responded (to their classmates' comments and to the story) not only critically and intelligently, but most of all, compassionately. normally, i restrict myself to just getting students to arrive at a comfortable critical stance, in relation to the story and the larger social context. and that, in itself, is a not the easiest thing to accomplish. after a lot of work, towards the end of the sem, i am hardly able to take pride in seeing them (or some of them, sometimes even just a few of them) arriving at that stance, confidently and comfortably using a particular critical (political) framework, employing a new vocabulary, and basically thinking unlike an over-indulged or over-eager freshman. this sem, i don't know what happened. or maybe i missed it. but before i knew it, [practically] the entire class matured as readers (and as persons), and even overshot my expectations. i cannot claim any credit for it. but let me revel in it. today's was probably the least exciting, certainly one of the most orderly, of discussions i have ever handled. i am one to encourage and instigate a boisterous, lively, sometimes out of hand, exchange, which usually characterize the discussions in this particular class. today, i didn't have to instigate anything. i barely did any facilitating, truthfully.

it wasn't so much the wonderful exchange that struck me, it was the graceful quieting that i witnessed after the discussion.

this is how i want my formalism explained

2008-08-09T22:17:00.000-07:00

by a bad-ass writer who thinks that "magic realism sucks", and that there are only two things in life that are truly enjoyable: "Borges and making love".

***

"Yes, plots are a strange matter. I believe, even though there may be many exceptions, that at a certain moment a story chooses you and won’t leave you in peace. Fortunately, that’s not so important—the form, the structure, always belong to you, and without form or structure there’s no book, or at least in most cases that’s what happens. Let’s say the story and the plot arise by chance, that they belong to the realm of chance, that is, chaos, disorder, or to a realm that’s in constant turmoil (some call it apocalyptic). Form, on the other hand, is a choice made through intelligence, cunning and silence, all the weapons used by Ulysses in his battle against death. Form seeks an artifice; the story seeks a precipice. Or to use a metaphor from the Chilean countryside (a bad one, as you’ll see): It’s not that I don’t like precipices, but I prefer to see them from a bridge."

(Roberto Bolaño, in an interview with Carmen Boullosa, BOMB Magazine, Issue 78 Winter 2002, LITERATURE)

have i said it lately, that i love...

2008-07-28T04:02:00.000-07:00

Ian McEwan? I do! I do!

***

"The dream, surely, Zadie, that we all have, is to write this beautiful paragraph that actually is describing something but at the same time in another voice is writing a commentary on its own creation, without having to be a story about a writer."

-- IM in a conversation with another favorite,
Zadie Smith.(August 2005 issue of Believer magazine)

ang guapo ni adam sa libro na 'to! at na gets ni krip!

2008-07-28T03:05:00.000-07:00

please read sir krip's latest column:
http://philstar.com/index.php?Arts%20and%20Culture&p=49&type=2&sec=40&aid=2008072715

Adam & the eve of our poetry: Read Doveglion
KRIPOTKIN By Alfred A. Yuson
Monday, July 28, 2008

Encountering the Self (or more unsolicitied critiques)

2008-07-23T21:58:00.000-07:00

as well as a few solicitied ones, for carljoe. this one here's a consolidated critique of a couple of short stories. this essay forms part of chapter 5 (i think) of my thesis.

Encountering the Self, Lack, and Desire
in Philippine Urban Fantasy,Horror and Ghost Stories

Not considering the stories in Nick Joaquin’s Tropical Gothic (first published in 1972), it was only in the last few years when collections of supernatural, horror or ghost stories saw publication by the country’s major commercial and academic publishers. Since 2003, with the publication of a series of urban ghost story collections Best Philippine Ghost Stories whose authors were mainly unknown or literally anonymous, there have been at least four more anthologies of horror/ghost/supernatural stories that have come out, three of which were put together by, and contain works of, young writers, mostly in their twenties and thirties. This is a remarkable development considering that prior to this, no anthologies of such nature were being put out by publishers.

Interestingly, it was the UP Press which published the first such anthology called Nine Supernatural Stories (2004). After a year and a half, the UP Press put out another collection of the same genre, entitled Damaged People— Tales of the Gothic Punk (2006), also by a young fictionist, Karl De Mesa. De Mesa’s works, however, while sharing many features and qualities with the supernatural stories, are ultimately in a category of their own. They are not so much supernatural, as “punk-gothic”, employing a different set of strategies and displaying more varied influences, particularly from the “punk”— anti-establishment youth movement/attitude. (As such, they are separately discussed, in another paper).

Another significant development along these lines is the publication of the three-volume anthology Philippine Speculative Fiction, spearheaded by Dean Francis Alfar, himself one of the foremost practitioners of genre fiction writing. These anthologies are comprised of stories that employ fantasy, among other narrative modes, in various ways, resulting likewise in various types and genres.

In their introduction to the anthology Nine Supernatural Stories, April Yap and Lara Saguisag, remark on the unexpected paucity of supernatural fiction in our written literature, considering the popularity of the ghost story and the abundance of supernatural characters in our collective imagination. In one of the few fora centered on supernatural, fantasy and science fiction (November, 2004) sponsored by the UP Institute of Creative Writing (UP ICW) the invited authors, particularly Emil Flores of UP lamented the fact that the only indicators that the supernatural and fantasy holds some importance in these times, are the highly popular fantasy soap operas featuring mutated and mutilated local mythical characters, aired every evening by the country’s two largest TV networks. Three years and several anthologies and single-author collections later, perhaps there are more than enough indicators that fantasy holds some importance in these particular times.

In the area of written narratives, one related local study done by Yvette Natalie Tan, “In(Visible) Monster: the Theory and Praxis of Horror in Philippine Short Fiction in English” (MA Thesis, UP, 2005), tackles the elements of horror seen in Philippine short fiction in English. It is interesting in that it offers different categories of horror images in the fiction pieces she studied. The horror images according to Tan are sourced from either: (1)Ethnic-Native Practices; (2) Western Practices; and (3) the often contradicting combination of Native Filipino and Western Practices.

Given that Philippine short story in English is dominantly realist, Tan attempts to present an interesting enough standpoint (by examining the elements of horror) from which to view the stories. Her study, however, does not focus on the horror fiction genre per se, and her approach and treatment are limited to a close reading of images and metaphors. Tan’s study succeeds in showing that what are generally considered as serious, realist literature in academe do make use of horror elements that are more commonly seen in “non-serious” and non realist genres.

My paper is not so much interested in elevating to the level of serious fiction the status of the supernatural horror genre, or genre fiction in general. It is, however, interested in studying them as already significant narratives that function in the articulation or subversion of concepts of self.

It is interesting to note that most of the anthologized Philippine short stories in English that employ fantasy as a narrative mode while exploring the mysterious and miraculous, also deal with the gloomy and the grotesque, the horrific and the macabre, whether in terms of theme and subject matter, or of setting and atmosphere. Moreover, in most of the stories, the plot unfolds in urban settings, the city’s decay and chaos serving as an important backdrop for the subject’s deracination, rupture, and fragmentation. For the few stories not set amidst the heady, confusing, and also alienating city, the narratives are set against eerie, lonely provincial locations, featuring daunting, colonial mansions; vast haciendas; and sinister landscapes.

Indeed, the stories taken up in this paper vary greatly from one another but perhaps the one quality they share is the preoccupation with or the assumption of the existence of “Other” strange beings, elusive elementals, chilling unseen presences. Most of the stories are also premised on first-time occurrences, highlighting the fear of the unknown. It is the mystery, after all, that terrifies. And my reading is partly an attempt to reveal that no mystery is more terrifying than that which involves the subject’s struggle, through narrativization, to keep certain desires unknown to others, but most of all to the self.

In an attempt to analyze and to illustrate the range of possibilities that the employment of fantasy produces in a text, I have selected a couple of stories from four different anthologies, (from Nine Supernatural Stories, ed. Lara Saguisag and April Yap; Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol. 1, Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol. 2, ed. Dean Francis Alfar; and Afraid, ed. Danton Remoto). More specifically, I shall look into the concepts of subjectivity that are produced, explored, or subverted, in Philippine urban fantasy, ghost and horror stories in English.

The concept of subjectivity that operates in this paper is anchored on the concepts of Jacques Lacan, through Catherine Belsey, who explains that subjectivity is related to the concept of individual “consciousness” a “consciousness-in-itself, as distinct from a consciousness of something”, and, more specifically, a “consciousness of self”. Thus, “subjectivity” implies that this “consciousness depends on differentiation, and specifically… differentiation between ‘I’ and ‘you’” (55-56), or the subject and the Other. This differentiation is “a process made possible by language” (56). The preoccupation with the Other may also then be read here as a preoccupation with the self. It is also in this sense that “Fantasy is a field of symbolically structured meaning (the unconscious) that shapes and regulates our desires…” (Tadiar 9).

This study tackles these basic questions: What concepts of subjectivity emerge in the production of the strange, absolutely ‘other’ and different? How, and to what end, are elements of realism and aspects of reality subverted in the Philippine urban fantasy ghost and horror stories?

In order to address the texts’ problematic, the stories in this paper are viewed as corresponding to a gap in the self, such that the focus of the approach is that site in the narrative wherein the social and psychological spaces intersect. This site or location corresponds closely to the location of fantasy— in the indeterminate space between mimetic and marvelous— as it is understood in this study. From a purely psychoanalytic framework, this site, wherein resides the so-called Lacanian Thing (Das Ding) is the leftover space after the process of symbolic signification has been completed. Fantasy, as a narrative mode, accommodates the display of leftover, excessive, “un-interpretible” elements after castration, thereby effectively reminding us of the cost of actualizing the process of signification and the movement toward cultural order.

Employing a psychoanalytic and structural framework in the study of classic and contemporary horror stories and films, Stefan Gullatz, for instance, states that at the core of horror narratives is a site of leftover or excess responses which cannot be accounted for by the ideological subject. According to Gullatz, this site is

"…that which cannot be signified at all, despite repeated attempts, and thus, in the popular imagination persists only as an inert, meaningless, amorphous mass. There is a constitutive void at the heart of the symbolic order designating its inconsistency. Any object that is elevated to this site becomes associated with a traumatic, excessive enjoyment and will be perceived to be radically at odds with the socio-linguistic universe of flexible meanings and controllable emotions in which 'normal' beings can live and breathe." (www.horschamp. qc.ca/ new_offscreen /lacan.html)

The source of horror, in this sense, is the prospect of having to encounter those elements which have been ejected by the self from its consciousness, a process the subject has to go through in order for the self to exist in and coexist with society. (www.horschamp. qc.ca/ new_offscreen /lacan.html).

Robert Miles in Gothic Writing echoes Gullatz’s findings in his own exploration of the horror and the gothic quality in English gothic novels. Miles notes that the qualities ascribed to the term gothic, which is generally related to a variety of the English novel that surfaced in the mid-eighteenth century, has not really changed in terms of plots, motifs and figures. This consistency, repetition, and recycling of themes and styles are seen by Miles to be an indication of a powerful drive, and of a symbolic disparity in the social self, an issue which remains relevant until now, as evidenced by the lively practice of gothic or horror fiction writing at present (Miles 1).

Rosemary Jackson further echoes Miles’s suggestion of a powerful drive seen behind the production of horror narratives, but advances further and identifies this drive as unconscious desire. Likewise, Jackson identifies the site which Gullatz mentions in his study as an ideological site. As Jackson explains, it is through the expressive functions of fantasy that it is able to indicate or point to the seemingly precarious foundation of cultural order “for it opens up, for a brief moment, on to disorder, on to illegality, on to that which lies outside the law, that which is outside dominant value systems…” In doing so, fantasy also “traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made ‘absent’” (3-4).

My initial observations and assumptions about Philippine urban fantasy ghost and horror stories point to the idea that these stories are necessarily fragmentary and often inchoate, and the very form is itself an articulation of an attitude towards realist fiction, if not reality itself. This stand acquires more significance when we consider the very concept of realism as being culturally contingent. Catherine Belsey has renewed the interest in realist fiction and how it creates subjects out of its readers, by seeming to be transparent. Belsey also explains that the concept of realism is never stable, that it changes and, over the years, has made increasing demands on the form, as certain groups and movements have aspired for ever increased verisimilitude in art (47). Belsey also says that “even in fantasy, events, however improbable in themselves, are related to each other in familiar ways” (48).

Belsey then opens the possibility and reinforces the value of studying narratives such as the pieces being included in this study, by pointing out that “the plausibility of individual signifieds is far less important to the reading process than the familiarity of the connections between the signifiers. It is the set of relationships between characters or events, or between characters and events, which makes fantasy convincing” (47).

Another assumption this paper rests on, even as it does not submit to a purely psychoanalytical approach, is that there is a very palpable “schizoid” aspect to the stories which, in discussions about the Gothic novel and its progenies and descendant forms, has already been identified as not just an aesthetic device or decision, but more of an indication of a fissure, a fracture, or a wound, in the social self or the subject, which the writing of it is an attempt to address (Miles 1).

This paper considers the stories here as a discursive site, a coherent code for the representation of a disjointed subjectivity, a code that is often organized along structuralist principles (Miles 2), a la Todorov. However, I would like to posit that this site may be viewed as an unstable system, for these structuralist principles—clear binaries and opposites, such as light and dark, good and bad, humans versus non-humans—are themselves thwarted within the narratives. As the succeeding sections shall endeavor to illustrate, the stories or narratives studied in this paper contain different discourses in competition with each other, and are always in the process of revising one another.

Absence and Lack as signifiers of fear

In “The Man Who came Home” (Basilio, 85-91) and “Street Corner” (Javier, 46-52) from the Nine Supernatural Stories anthology, and, to a certain extent, “Room 1119” (Cheng, 11-16) from the Afraid anthology, terror arises when the sense of balance is threatened, when the very fiber of the character’s manhood is put to the test. In these three stories, the dominant speaking subject is a middleclass male, the series of [unfortunate] events told from his standpoint, and the state of affairs being problematized are directly/indirectly caused by the absence of the female partner. The woman here then becomes doubly absent, not merely rendered as a symbol of absence. But it is precisely because the symbol of absence is absent, that she is very much present.

In “The Man Who came Home”, for instance, the story opens with the narrator, a young professional, coming home to an empty middle-class condominium unit, for the first time, without his wife. The rest of the story takes pains then to highlight this absence, and to evoke the heightened solitary and terrible experience of the male subject by underlining the male subject’s conflicted reaction towards himself and the situation he finds himself in:

"Dante… said that the reason he came early was that he was the only one who didn’t care about his job as much as the others would. But this wasn’t entirely true… Dante told Jimmy that he was already out of the corporate game, the rat race, the desire for promotion and recognition, but he wasn’t sure if the guard understood what he was talking about… He just didn’t want Jimmy to get any bright ideas, especially since Dante knew that Mrs. Victoria, who lived two doors down to their left, was having an affair with one of her husband’s subordinates. Or at least, that was according to Leah, his wife, who said that she got it from one of the Victorias’ maids she once met at the hall and who was later fired." (86)

Here we also glimpse the reality of the young professional man whose position seems to be always under threat. He has a well-paying job that he does not really desire, but has to keep because it provides his life a semblance of stability, and himself some sense of power: “… being a bank manager already gave him a full plate at dinner, what with small and medium-scale enterprises in his area sprouting like mushrooms after a rainstorm and each of them asking for loans and letters of credit.” (86)

Despite what he is able to provide for himself and his wife, he is not a fully satisfied man, his life being one of compromises. Even the space he is occupying has to be a compromised space, his and his wife’s lives vulnerable to all kinds of interpretation from the people with whom they share space in the building. The mention of domestic rumors is a threat to him who values his independence and privacy. He is careful to show the guard, Jimmy, that he is liberal enough since he allows his wife to go out with office mates, that he knows exactly where his wife is going and what she is doing, and that she is able to do such things only with his blessing. The young man is ultra conscious about what kind of image to present to the other man, Jimmy, who, the story is careful to point out, obviously occupies a lower, inferior social status.

The husband’s conflicted reaction to his wife watching something cheap and kitschy although he knows her to not be “baduy” is parallel to his unsettled feeling about her going off alone, and him coming home to an empty condominium unit.

"Thankfully, Jimmy didn’t bother to ask him what movie it was they saw because it was a cheap bold flick starring Richard Gomez, Pops Fernandez, and Joyce Jimenez. Dante didn’t want him to think that his wife was baduy because she really wasn’t." (86)

The internal conflicts also have to be faced then, all the time. What the husband desires is utopia, balance, harmony, which he also knows to be very difficult to attain, and perhaps the source of fear is the realization that none of these is attainable.

"Although he didn’t believe in anything even vaguely supernatural, he was nonetheless disturbed by the thought of spending the whole time waiting for his wife alone in their unit, let alone the whole floor… He was the only one on the floor for the night, and so what? He could handle himself; he was a man; that was the whole point of spending a couple of hours every week in the gym." (87)

He has to constantly assure himself of his manhood and his social position, he wants the other man, Jimmy, to know where he stands, to know which position he occupies, but he is also very affected by what Jimmy says.

This is then the function of the narrative – to assure and constantly reassure him of his position. He has to create this narrative about himself and for himself, to keep his fears and anxieties about the palpable instability of his life under wraps.
Throughout the story we are shown an unmistakable expression of his aspirations, an idealization of a preferred reality, an image, a re-presentation. It is the male, the husband talking here, after all, re-presenting their lives to Others, to the guard, for instance, whose opinion he somehow values. Moreover, the Subject (the husband) here seeks to inscribe a “lack”, a sense of inferiority and inadequacy in the Other (i.e., the guard, the wife), in order to secure his own position in relation to the Other.

The almost obsessive reiteration of the husband’s masculinity is also a ploy to make readers ambivalent about the situation, but it mostly cements the fact that this character takes comfort in his being male, and thinks that this is his last bastion, against all forces that threaten him and his position. And so, after we are given a glimpse into everything that happens in what seems to be an unusual night in the life of this self-assured yuppy, the narrative takes us finally to the point of intersection between the natural, logical, practical world and that of the supernatural; the moment at which the familiar world gives in to the necessary demands of the supernatural.

"… he felt a gust of cold wind blast through the wide-open living room window. It got so cold that he, who had been waiting for his wife to arrive for the past half-hour, had felt it in his bones and begun to shiver… He felt that there was something mysterious about that wind, coming in like that on a hot night like this one, catching him by surprise. Since he liked to believe that he was a logical man, he quickly dismissed the thought, although he could not ignore the chill he felt when the wind rushed in… Dante, like the dutiful husband he was, tried to get up to close the windows…Before Dante could even get up, somebody tapped him twice on the shoulder…

With much resolve, he finally looked over his shoulder." (90-91)

When the man resolves to finally stare fear in the face, there is nothing there. The story does not provide a figure we can make out, anyway; it does not have to anymore. The signifier is absence itself; the ghostly presence of the absence, is the signified fear. We do not have to know what happens to the man who came home, without his wife –because that in itself is a scary situation (one worth telling as a supernatural horror story, indeed).

Willard Cheng’s “Room 1119”, on the other hand, has the feel of a personal essay, a testimony, complete with a postscript and footnotes. The story is a first-person account of the unusual experiences of a young Ateneo male student who lives alone in a flat in a twenty-story condominium building, much like the residential building which serves as a setting for “The Man Who Came Home”. The testimony mode used in the story implies that the narrator has an assumed listener, or the narrator naturally assumes, is used to assuming, that someone is listening. The events that he narrates are not actually so unusual, or “disturbing” in themselves. Again, similar to the concerns of the Husband in “The Man Who Came Home”, much of the horror of the situation arises from the young student’s being alone, and from his anxieties arising from the need to accomplish tasks, which the “disturbing episodes” prohibit him from doing.

"My computer would now start to open by itself , many times, when I came out of the bathroom. One night, when I was typing, a loaf of bread fell from the glass dining table… the doorbell rang in the middle of the night…" (14)

All of these are clearly non-threatening, and leads one to think that perhaps the threat is not so much external as internal. It is the psychological space which is under attack. The culmination, in fact, of al these “disturbing episodes” is no different from what the Husband in “The Man Who Came Home” experiences:

"... it was finally during bedtime when I strongly felt a spirit’s presence… I woke up when the right side of my body felt cold, as if somebody just lay beside me." (14)

But, whereas Basilio’s story ends very interestingly (and cleverly) with the husband looking behind his shoulder to stare at the disturbing presence, and offers no more explication, or resolution, Cheng’s story ends (quite funnily) with the narrator's attempt to make peace with the presence, the invisible roommate:

“I had the sense that the spirit in the apartment did not want me to move out…” (16).

All this is, of course, the narrator’s own convenient interpretation (illusion, or fantasy), because there is no actual encounter with the so-called invisible roommate, no clear sign as to what she (because the narrator assumes it to be a woman) wants from the narrator. Here, again, is a case of the subject imbuing the Other, not only with a gender – woman, who is a symbol of absence— but also with a sense of need, and desire. Moreover, the narrator does not so much desire to expel this paradoxical absent presence from the room, but seeks instead to fuse with it, to “make peace” with it. And, of course, when the narrator leaves the place, he is convinced that “the spirit” desires for him to stay as well.

In Carljoe Javier’s “Street Corner” the main character is an adolescent male who finds himself going back to, and forever psychologically rooted in, a particular spot on the street corner where his girlfriend was accidentally killed. The story hinges itself on the suddenness, the unexpectedness, of the condition that threw the boy into the very situation he was confronting. His curse is that he cannot get out of it, not by himself and his very limited human capabilities and assumptions anyway.

"The accidents occurred on the same date that Katy was killed, the 21st. Each month brought a new driver with a red taxi, but never him. And I prayed each time that it was him, that it would be over. But at the same time I wanted it to go on, because an end to the vigil would mean an end to Katy and me.

This was my way of paying her back. And it was my only chance to be with her. The warmth of her body that I used to feel was replaced by the paralyzing shiver that she greeted me with every time. But I could still feel her, know that she was with me." (47-48)

Here we are given a glimpse into how the two very powerful emotions that drive the story – fear and guilt – are also rooted in the young characters’ first sexual encounter, one that the girl was unwilling to participate in. Fear and guilt then become inextricable from the suppression/fulfillment of the boy’s desire.

"…I was still frustrated about the day before. We cut classes and went to SM to see a movie. During the movie I kissed her and forced my tongue into her mouth. At first she pulled away, but when she asked me if I loved her and I told her that I did, she gave in. She gave in to much more. Each time I tried something she resisted at first, but I assured her that I loved her, and told her that if she loved me she’d do it… When we finished I was tired and slumped back into my seat. Katy looked like she wanted to cry, like she wanted to say something to me but was holding it back. I couldn’t understand what could’ve been wrong; it was my first time too, but I wasn’t reacting to it the way that she did. I was actually pretty proud of myself." (49-50)

Guilt and fear, extreme grief, sexual frustration, are all a function of the desiring subject, who is also characterized by lack, unfulfilled desires. This story, much like “The Man…” takes effort to present the outside reality in order to emphasize the breakdown of the internal world; is grounded in the mimetic and yet is diametrically opposed to it.

In stories such as these, fantasy as a narrative mode functions to critique representation by rendering the crucial scenes, “the horror turn” purposefully ambiguously. It is remarkable how the flashbacks, reconfigured events in the mind, are the scenes that are rendered realistically, while the scenes in the narrators’ present are located in the realm of fantasy, existing in the underside of reality. This may be read as not a mere inversion of reality, but rather an attempt to question the very foundation, the structures, upon which ground rules and conventional notions of reality are founded. Robert Miles in Gothic Writing posits the idea of a “Gothic turn” by which he means “an inner momentum to break open ideological figures, the tendency of Gothic writing to turn upwards hidden discursive seams, to reveal concealed lines of power” (6).

The above-mentioned stories also seem to operate on a kind of presence/absence principle, revealing that the self is never stable, that the social self has many layers, that it is a construction (of ideology), and thus subject of and subject to psycho-social economies. More interestingly, the stories illustrate that, in the subject’s constitution or formation, the Other becomes, necessarily the locus of all subjectifying practices.

Fantasy and sustained reversals

In the other stories, it is not so much presence or absence which are the issues. In stories like Adel Gabot’s “Beggar of Description” (Nine Supernatural Stories 3-14) , the central metaphor for the site wherein resides the source of terror is a wound, a disfigurement, a physical defect. And whereas in the stories discussed above, the principle at work is absence and presence, in Gabot’s story, it is reversal, a changing of places, and thwarted expectations.

The story “Beggar of Description” opens with a scene showing a middle class mother and her child forced to take a jeepney ride one rainy morning. The story takes off from this situation which is carefully pointed out as being out of the ordinary, the opening descriptions highlighting the discomfort of the woman at being thrown in the company of strangers, the common public, in a confined space. The experience is brought to its most terrifying when a beggar enters the jeepney. The beggar is right away portrayed as a threat, but whose character goes through a reversal (as the experience is also inverted in the manufactured narrative in the female character’s memory), when he performs a miracle—wiping away and absorbing an imperfection, a live scar, from a baby’s face.

Bordering on the cliche, the beggar who is the symbol of terror in the story, is rendered also as the extreme Other. The detailed description of the beggar’s features, as well as the mother’s rapt attention on him, are really constitutive of the perceiving subject’s (the woman’s) desire. Here, once more, is a discourse on the subject’s need to inscribe a lack in the Other, in order to claim her position as the Other’s object of desire. It is necessary that the Other be portrayed as lacking in an almost non-human sense; as extremely dirty and therefore dangerous, in order to fulfill the subject’s illusion of wholeness. It is, after all, only by rendering the other in such a manner, by stressing the difference, the dirt and disfigurement, that the subject finds sense in her own self and the situation she finds herself in.

"…If Elli hadn’t suddenly drawn against me, it would have been some time before I realized we had an extra passenger. But then again, I think the smell would have alerted me before long.
The man was filthy. And that was being kind… He wore tattered, blackened clothes that were more hole than fabric, held together by grime. Old and thin, the man had long, wet oily hair plastered to his head like a greasy shawl. He was veined with light brown lines where the rain had eroded the dirt on his skin. I supposed I should be thankful that the downpour had washed him off a little. He clung to the bars at the back of the jeep and left grease marks on them.

It didn’t seem to bother him much that the jeep was full; I don’t think it mattered – empty or not, he’d likely just hang on to the back anyway. I felt Elli relax against me as she realized that the taong grasa had no intention of forcing himself inside and finding a seat. She looked as relieved as the other passengers, and I imagined my face reflected similar sentiments… I took a surreptitious look at our new passenger and was more appalled by what I saw; he was worse off on close inspection.
He looked like he could keep a team of doctors busy for a whole day straight. He had running and bleeding sores; in fact, he seemed to have a scar on every other pore, and sores in between. A nasty, scabbed and pus-crusted gash on his elbow looked raw and bleeding. If they ever got him to sit still long enough to be treated, I don’t think the doctors at Sta. Isabel would know where to start." (8-9)

Fantasy, in this story, sets the stage for the configurations of desire (literally illustrated in the spatial arrangement, the confines of a jeepney, which brings into focus the manner in which the Subject’s desire is “arranged” in relation to the Other). And yet, paradoxically, fantasy also erases the limits of desire—dramatized in the scene when the Taong Grasa, a person characterized by grease and dirt, removes, erases, a permanent wound and disfigurement in the baby.
What is more interesting to note is how the supernatural/horror turn—the point in the narrative when the natural and supernatural spaces intersect, or disappear—happens in the story, and later reveals itself to be not just a questioning of everyday reality, but a necessary truth for the woman, who has to believe that there is a kernel of spiritual profundity hidden in every new experience. Thus, the boundaries of the “stage” for the configuration of desires are erased, or at least extended.

"Sometimes when I sit thinking, I dread the moment I actually do find him because I don’t think I know what I’ll do. A large part of me wishes I forget the whole thing. Perhaps I’m better off not knowing. But I can’t let it go.

On that day, several things conspired to make me a witness to something that has changed my life. It was one of those rare cusps when things come together for no apparent reason and have dramatic effects on lives. Some people win lotteries, and some have the unfortunate luck to step in the path of a stray bullet." (3)

The story does not end with the so-called horror turn, with the taong grasa performing a miracle on the poor baby, it ends with an exposition about how the woman provides the poor mother and daughter in the jeepney employment and education, after the experience they shared in the jeepney. This story is evidently very catholic, very middle-class, very urban. There is in this story another, a stronger, narrative about the need to save and be a savior, the play of a discourse of power vis-a-vis desire. Yes, it is the beggar, the Other, who turns out to be the miracle performer, but in the end it is the woman and her family, who are the real heroes, according to the narrative woven by the subject (the mother) around herself.

Emil Flores’s story “Ghosts of Infinity” also deals with reversals, but of a different kind. Flores’s story stands out in this collection because it features qualities of a detective story (it has an investigator for a character), a mystery (there is a puzzle that he is seeking to solve), and investigative news documentary (it closely follows events and actions by the hour, and its headings mimic the form of a tv script). The allusion to factual life stops there, however, and the rest of the story teeters between the mimetic and the marvelous, questioning representation and producing new subjectivities. The TV evangelist and the Professor are recognizable as humans, but they are also “Lemurians” from “beyond this world” (34). The investigators find out that they are not just investigating the case of a missing person, but also of beings who do not leave the earth, persons who do not die, but rather transform themselves into TV evangelists and university professors.

Flores's stry is interesting in that of all the stories in the Supernatural anthology, this is the only one that sources its “supernaturalness” from religious practices and anomalies. While at it, the story also seems to be taking a jab at Philippine media for capitalizing on this, and at Filipino viewers for being easily duped and numbed by media into thoughtlessness:

"The cops were supposed to be investigating an abduction right in their own backyard but instead, the ones on duty were watching TV. I guess with meager pay comes meager work… I took a peek at the 14-inch television set sitting on top of a rusty green filing cabinet. It was the “Infinite Dream Crusade with Daniel Salvacion.” And there he was, the one who asked the Bureau to find the missing Dizon. I wanted to talk to the Dreamer but I had to schedule an appointment with him for my investigation. He was concerned but apparently his show came first… he espoused the power of dreams… Perfect for people who have nothing left but dreams." (26-27)

The story likewise draws attention to the pervasiveness of the unnatural or “supernatural” in Philippine daily life and how, because of this pervasiveness, they become “natural”. As the investigator character says, “It’s hard to tell which is real and what is imagined” (37).

Like the other stories in the four anthologies taken up in the paper, the illusion of wholeness, as is the very search itself, remains a central concern. In this case, the investigation is being carried out in order to solve a puzzle; to fill the gaps in, and lend logic to the narrative. Moreover, the fulfillment of this desire for wholeness/unitariness (of the narrative puzzle, and of the self) is always only illusory and impermanent. What is striking about this particular story, “Ghosts of Infinity”, is that its narrative is structured in such a way that highlights the illusoriness rather than glosses it over. The story ends on an uncertain note: The Professor who was abducted has gone crazy, while the perpetrator of evil, who is also a contributor to politicians’ campaign funds, retains his image as an evangelist on TV.

(To be continued)

so, i say...

2008-07-20T09:20:00.000-07:00

THANK YOU FOR THE MUSIC!
and who, who among you, who? who can live without it? i ask, in all honesty. what would life be? without a song, or a dance, what are we? so, i say: thank you for the music, for giving it to me!

and yes, quite apparently, i just came from gateway's last full show of Mama Mia! been meaning to watch it much sooner, on opening day, actually, but i had to give in to husband weng's earnest request (and uber-enthusiasm, and uber-preparation) for The Dark Knight, which i enjoyed thoroughly. we watched the first run on the first day at the globe platinum theater, on an empty stomach (because there was no time for breakfast. i finished tuloy two and a half buckets of popcorn! pero free naman, so okay lang). point is, how could i not have enjoyed it? consider the lineup naman -- i mean, really. need i really say more? and consider the record-breaking 66 million dollar debut! i won't even bother adding my two cents worth to it. just read the raves and reviews, all of which i agree with. but, Mamma Mia! i love. read sir butch's take on it here:"http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/MyBlog.html#bdx238219897" happy siya! and abba lyrics notwithstanding, i really have been thinking and talking about, (and also singing and dancing to) music a lot these past few days. in the last three consecutive days, to be exact. and, on such days, when life is filled with endless criminal and civil cases to read, all i can say is... thank you for the music! god, abba songs are still playing in my head. and the image of stellan skaarsgard, colin firth, and pierce brosnan in sequined, flared overalls, and platform shoes is, i think, permanently etched in my memory, too. and it's like my mind is grinning, while i'm singing inside it. that's like clinical craziness already, right? but, beyond the embarrassingly merry and loud laughter and the involuntary joyful singing that the film elicits from the viewers, there's meryl streep's excellent performance, the experience of which is always worth paying for. worth ruining the no-more-than-once-a-week film viewing budget for.

Constructions and Disruptions of Jouissance

2008-07-06T04:58:00.000-07:00

in Salamanca by Dean Francis Alfar

The novel Salamanca (2005) (as are the stories in the Philippine Speculative Fiction anthologies) by Dean Francis Alfar is an interesting object of study because it is probably the very first Filipino novel in English written by a Filipino writer who openly declares himself as an advocate and practitioner of non-realist (what he terms as “speculative”) writing. Alfar opens his introduction to Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol. 1 with the declaration: “I am a fantasist at heart” (vii), and further into the essay defines speculative fiction as “the literature of the fantastic”, asserting further that “to find the fantastic, we must create the fantastic…. And so this anthology” (viii). If Alfar’s Salamanca were to be studied as the paradigmatic Philippine “spec fic” novel,
and the stories in the Philippine Speculative Fiction anthology be considered as Alfar’s best examples of “spec fic” and the fantastic, then the findings of such a study would certainly point to very interesting ideas about the sense of fantasy and speculation that these “spec fic” writers have. It is certainly worth looking into the assumptions about fantasy that operate in these stories.
Fantasy, as it is used in this thesis, is a narrative mode that operates in the ambiguous spaces between the mimetic and the marvelous. It is also understood here as a mode driven by desire, which brings out and points to questions of the unconscious. It is, in other words, a field of symbolically structured meaning that structures even as it disrupts notions of the ‘real’ (Tadiar 9). What manifests as fantasy can only have been registered in the unconscious, which is why fantasy is driven strongly by desire. Fantasy as literature of desire is therefore able to point to the lack, and remind us of what has been left out with the entry of the self into the symbolic order; in the continuous process of subjectification, in the name of social/cultural order.
In novels like Cave and Shadows (Nick Joaquin), Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café (Alfred Yuson), and The Firewalkers (Erwin Castillo), fantasy is employed in a manner that seems to take into account not only its disruptive (or subversive) properties, but its ordering and “structuring” functions as well. In these novels, fantasy reveals the location occupied by fragmented subjectivities to be a location of sustained ambiguity beyond the mimetic, but does not quite become marvelous. It is a location that necessarily requires the mimetic and falls just a step behind the marvelous. The location occupied by fantasy is a fertile ground for questioning and subversion (in the case of these three novels, what is being questioned are notions of representation and subjectivity in relation to history and nation), allowing for the production of multiple narratives and multiple subjectivities.
Fantasy in the novel Salamanca (2005), as well as in the stories from the Philippine Speculative Fiction 1 (2005) and Philippine Speculative Fiction 2 (2006) anthologies, written by Alfar operates differently from how fantasy operates in the other novels mentioned above. Perhaps, this is the main question that should be looked into: In what ways is Alfar’s novel Salamanca different from the other novels that also make use of fantasy and other non-realist narrative strategies and modes? To what extent is this novel Salamanca able to express, undermine, or subvert culturally dominant notions of representations of subjectivity and of history?
In Salamanca, only a minimal portion occupies the space between mimetic and marvelous, as most of it is either mimetic or marvelous. Going by Slavoj Zizek’s approach, another interesting aspect to look into are the manifestations of “hidden fantasy” in the less marvelous and more mimetic parts of the book: character motivation in relation to the betrayal, the sacrifice, the sexual transgressions; the power play and power struggles; and the shifting of roles among characters of different sexualities and genders. Understanding the motivations of characters will yield an understanding of the notions about subjectivity explored in the novel; about the drives that characterize fantasy as a narrative mode and, perhaps, about narratives and meaning-making that the novel explores, in particular sequences where fantasy is used as a narrative mode.
Salamanca is “a rapturous tale of love found, lost and rediscovered involving killer typhoons, amorous townsfolk, and an American missionary who curses in several languages…. At its heart is… a love story between two persons… [that] subtly traces the many permutations of love from romantic to authentic” where “In true magic realist fashion, love not only transforms the persons involved but warps the very landscape around them” as Miguel Escaño describes in his essay “Love in the Time of Solitude” (Current Magazine, Sept/Oct 2006). It is precisely because the novel is, “at its heart, a love story” that its employment of fantasy as a narrative mode is worth looking into.
The scenes in the novel that are rendered in fantasy are symptomatic of the
configurations of the excesses and lack of its characters (or of the subject), that cannot be accommodated by classic-realist strategies of characterization. A study of the novel’s characterization through an examination of the manner in which each character’s desire and jouissance are configured leads to an understanding of the subject’s being incomplete, and always under construction.
Salamanca is made up of three major parts or chapters – “Gaudencio and Jacinta”, “Men, women and other fictions”, and “Letters to Filomena” – each of which corresponds to a particular phase in the intertwined lives of the characters Gaudencio Rivera and Jacinta Cordova, but mainly that of Gaudencio’s. The first part of the novel, “Gaudencio and Jacinta” details the arrival of Gaudencio in Tagbaoran, Palawan, his pursuit of, union with, and separation from Jacinta. The second part recounts the rise of Gaudencio in the literary world, his travels, and his string of sexual affairs with different men and women. Meanwhile, in the same part of the book, the very ordinary life of now ordinary woman Jacinta is also narrated. Here is also where another character, Bau Long Hyunh, the Vietnamese refugee, is introduced. The third and last part of the novel, is all about the family life of Gaudencio and Jacinta, which takes place entirely in different parts of Manila, and is narrated mainly through Jacinta’s letters to Filomena. If, in the second part of the novel, Gaudencio acquires his success as a writer by narrating and fictionalizing the events of their lives in Tagbaoran, in this part of the novel it is Jacinta who is the writer, who resorts to writing and narrativizing as a mode of survival. The novel, in fact, ends with one of Jacinta’s letters, the only one she wrote for Gaudencio, and which is revealed to him only after Jacinta’s death.
The character of Gaudencio is described as a “dissolute author” with “prodigious sexuality” who thinks of himself as a “gifted writer… often able to crystallize miraculous observations of mundane things… [but] sometimes blinded to more important matters” (1) like the fact that “ultimately, women were necessary to continue humanity’s existence, even if, occasionally, men proved to be better bedmates” (1-2). He is a chauvinist and very patriarchal, even as he crosses genders to satisfy his sexual needs. He is also characterized as being filled with his own sense of self-importance. Consistent with the writer cliché, he exploits other people’s lives to enrich his stories. He is at his most benevolent, and even heroic, only in Tagbaoran, when he was caught up in his veneration of Jacinta.
Gaudencio’s pursuit of Jacinta is really a pursuit of jouissance— “pleasure of a brute physical kind, the paradigm of which is the pleasure of orgasm” (Evans 4). Such that, when Gaudencio acquires it (and her), he had nowhere else to go but down, and away from the island, which no longer serves him any enjoyment, or jouissance. The matter of his marriage’s consummation, the physical union, proved inconsequential compared to the difficult pleasure of acquiring her. “Jouissance is thus lifted out of the register of the satisfaction of a biological need, and becomes instead the paradoxical satisfaction which is found in pursuing an eternally unsatisfied desire.” (Evans 5) This explains why Gaudencio was not interested in physically consummating his marriage to Jacinta. Thus, on the eleventh day of his marriage, after pursuing Jacinta aggressively through profuse letters, and with death-defying antics during a violent storm, he decides to leave her for his friend and sometime sexual partner Cesar Abalos, and the island of Palawan for the city of Manila, and eventually for Los Angeles in America. The entirety of Gaudencio’s narrated life may, in fact, be read as a story of one man’s pursuit of and efforts to sustain jouissance. In other words, a story about (and driven by) the pleasure of desiring.
The nuances of the concepts of jouissance and desire in Lacan’s lectures, are explained by Dylan Evans, as a complex operation wherein

…‘the subject does not simply satisfy a desire, he enjoys [jouit] desiring, and
this is an essential dimension of his jouissance’… In other words, desire is not
a movement towards an object that could satisfy it, and is therefore to be
conceived of as a movement which is pursued endlessly, simply for the enjoyment
(jouissance) of pursuing it. (5)

The satisfaction is paradoxical because while jouissance seems to be desire’s end, desire is necessarily “predicated on a lack of jouissance, since one can only desire what one does not have” (6). As Zizek likewise explains: “desire and jouissance are inherently antagonistic, exclusive even. Desire’s raison d’être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire” (214).
The construction of Gaudencio’s character – “a dissolute writer” with “prodigious sexuality” (1) – is interesting in that it makes an almost too obvious point about the insatiability and instability of the subject who is literally constituted by language (a writer) and driven by desire (characterized by prodigious sexuality).
Jacinta, meanwhile, is initially characterized by “beauty of such purity and perfection that the walls of the house she lived in turned transparent long ago, to allow both sunlight and moonlight to illuminate her incandescence” (2-3).
It is interesting to note that what actually makes Jacinta beautiful is the subject’s desire for her. Jacinta’s subjectivity is anchored on her being Othered, her subject-position is defined primarily by those who desire her. The glass walls that encase her (and render her vulnerable and exposed) may therefore be read as symbolic of her paradoxical situation: being within, but also out of, reach. Moreover, she becomes the signifier for all that is unsatisfiable and unsatisfied. When Gaudencio acquires her and then leaves her, consequently, she loses her beauty as well.
The immediate effect on Jacinta of her husband’s abrupt leavetaking was the diminishment of her unearthly beauty. The smooth skin on her face was interrupted by demarcations of grief, her hair lost its sheen, and the temperature that several times had threatened to consume her retreated into her numb heart. She stopped smiling as her facial muscles commiserated with her internal sorrow, and in a matter of days became as ordinary as any woman in town. (41)
In the novel, Jacinta eventually recovers from the tragedy and embarrassment of Gaudencio’s betrayal (even if she does not recover her lost beauty) and falls in love with another man, a Vietnamese refugee who was brought to the shores of Jacinta’s island by towering, tempestuous waves (55-57). It is interesting to note how the characters of Jacinta and Bau are paralleled to each other: they are, in a sense, both outcasts, both aliens or other-worldly, and both defined by difference. Moreover, what drew them together were forces beyond their control. In contrast, the character of Gaudencio is defined by control— he makes a living by molding life experiences into fiction, and, more obviously, he can come and go whenever and wherever he desires.
Taking off from Freud’s idea about the relationship between economic necessity and the repression of desire, Terry Eagleton stated that “what has dominated human history to date is the need to labour; and for Freud that harsh necessity means that we must repress some of our tendencies to pleasure and gratification” (131). Indeed, in this novel, the extent to which the characters are independent and mobile is, of course, also a function of their economic condition, another divide that positions Jacinta and Bau together on one side, and Gaudencio on the other.
Salamanca, however, also takes pains to render the characters in a manner other than classic-realist (or social realist), mainly through sustained, unexplained ambiguities (i.e., the glass walls that encase/define Jacinta; the towering waves that brought Bau to Palawan; the unexplainable and unexplained source of Gaudencio’s writing prowess and sexual appeal), and multiple narratives, similar to the strategies employed in the other novels earlier mentioned. There is, likewise, an assumption that narratives are necessary to construct a subject, a strategy which dramatizes the idea of the constitution of the subject through language. In order to make sense of Bau’s alien presence in the town, for instance, many narratives are woven around him, each of which competes for impossibility. Similarly, the changes in the characters of Gaudencio and Jacinta are narrativized in several non-mimetic ways. Beyond these strategies, however, what calls attention is the manner in which the characters’ lives are related to, or dependent on, each other. Ultimately, what links the characters together is desire, particularly the manner by which each attempts to organize the other’s desire, and, in the process, creates several subjectivities, if not subject-positions.
Jacinta, Bau, and even Cesar Abalos and are all subjects of and subject to Gaudencio’s jouissance and desire. Interestingly, in all three characters, jouissance operates in a manner that is contrary to Gaudencio’s. In their case, and more particularly in Jacinta’s case, “jouissance is no longer simply equated with the sensation of pleasure, but also comes to designate the opposite sensation, one of physical or mental suffering” (Evans 6).
Evans takes off from later Lacanian concepts about jouissance and explains that this understanding of jouissance should not be likened to masochism. According to him, “In masochism, pain is a means to pleasure; pleasure is taken in the very fact of suffering itself, so that it becomes difficult to distinguish pleasure from pain. With jouissance, on the other hand, pleasure and pain remain distinct; no pleasure is taken in the pain itself, but the pleasure cannot be obtained without paying the price of suffering” (6). To illustrate: Jacinta suffers in silence in the two occasions that she is severed from the object of her desire. In the second occasion, when she is separated from Bau, the price of suffering is the promise and possibility of reunion. Her jouissance is, therefore, ineffable, inexpressible in more ways than one – hers is unexplainable and bottomless, and, consequently one that arouses envy and jealousy.
When Gaudencio suddenly decides to “settle the matter of his prodigious sexuality and beget a child”, to “part the gossamer curtain that separated childhood from the real world” (1) this is to be understood as a decision to take up a part in the social order. But, whereas the same could have been achieved by “begetting” any other woman’s child, it is necessary that Gaudencio begets Jacinta’s, not only because she happens to be conveniently still legally married to him, but because Gaudencio desires Jacinta in a very significant way: Gaudencio seeks to be the constant object of the Other’s desire.
It is precisely Jacinta’s jouissance that Gaudencio is jealous of, and which he wants castrated in order for him and Jacinta to become part of a social unit, a family. This also fulfills another function for Gaudencio: for him to inscribe a lack in Jacinta, and therefore be the one to fill it.
Jacinta’s jouissance can be accurately described as “feminine jouissance”, and also the “jouissance of the Other”, which would explain why Gaudencio desires to organize and reconfigure it. “Feminine jouissance is… a qualitatively different form” of jouissance. It is “beyond the phallus”, and is something only the Other (in Lacan’s case, most of the time the other sex, or the female) has access to. Moreover, “this jouissance does relate to the Other as such,” as another (or an Other), kind of jouissance which often led Lacan to describe it in terms of a “mystical experience” illustrated by: "The image…of Bernini’s St. Theresa, about to be pierced by the golden spear of the angel. As is clear from St. Theresa’s own description of the event, this moment of mystical ecstasy is strongly suggestive of orgasmic enjoyment, and Lacan remarks in Seminar XX that one has only to look at the statue to realize that Saint Theresa is coming” (10).

Jacinta’s pleasure points are, therefore, out of Gaudencio’s reach; and are “ineffable” (Evans 10). Moreover, Jacinta’s is not only “feminine jouissance” but also “jouissance of the Other” which Lacan refers to as a “mirage... a jouissance which is only accessible to the Other” (Evans 10). The “jouissance of the Other” is an illusion of the subject that other people are happier, more satisfied, more complete. Jacinta’s silent acceptance of Gaudencio’s will disturbs the pattern and configuration of Gaudencio’s own fantasy in the sense that the subject (Gaudencio) always needs to inscribe a sense of inadequacy, a “lack” in the Other (Jacinta). Gaudencio requires proof that Jacinta is not complete, so he can elaborate his own desire and inscribe himself in Jacinta as the Other’s constant “object of desire”. Jacinta’s silent acceptance is the exact kind of ambivalence that characterizes “feminine jouissance” and “jouissance of the Other”, and eventually serves to fuel Gaudencio’s desire: “a movement which is pursued endlessly, simply for the enjoyment (jouissance) of pursuing it” (Evans 5).
Jacinta, for her part, is able to survive her separation from Bau Long Huynh (as a result of being coerced by Gaudencio to fulfill her wifely duties to him) by writing letters to her friend Filomena. But it is also, quite paradoxically, the distance, and the suspension of their (Jacinta’s and Bau’s) time together, from which Jacinta derives jouissance. And this is why Gaudencio can not really gain access to her—despite begetting several children from her—enough to fully impose his will on her.
Castration, lack, and the jouissance of the Other are important Lacanian concepts which would clarify this analysis further. In Lacan’s discussion of the “jouissance of the Other”, he explains that the origin of this kind of jouissance is rooted in the child’s endless attempts to be the object of the parents’, most of the time the mother’s, desire. The mother being the “primordial Other” (Evans 8) “must show some sign of incompleteness, fallibility, or deficiency… the mOther must demonstrate that she is a desiring (and thus also a lacking and alienated) subject, that she too has submitted to the splitting/barring action of language…” (Fink 53-54). When, in the child’s eyes, the mother is “complete, self-sufficient, and happy with herself independently of the child… this leaves no space for the child, [and] the child attempts to inscribe a lack in the Other, by seeking to introduce… a note of anxiety in the mother, perhaps by screaming or refusing to eat” (Evans 8-9). As the child develops, becomes a subject (that is, joins the symbolic realm; becomes constituted by language, as much as the subject constitutes language) “the memory of the first impression of the mother’s complete jouissance will persist in the illusion of a superabundant jouissance accessible only to the Other” (Evans 9).
Jacinta’s jouissance is seemingly drained away and forcefully renounced, in the name of social and cultural order, in the name of marriage, but this sacrificed jouissance returns in a more or less spectacular way, spectacular enough to disturb classic-realist conventions of representation. This is so because there is “no hygienic way to eliminate this excess bodily jouissance which is surplus to the requirements of utility… as Lacan claims, it cannot simply be disposed of… Lacan himself goes on… to link jouissance to Marx’s concept of surplus value, and coins the term ‘surplus jouissance’ (plus-de-jouir)” (Evans 20). Because of the surplus nature of this jouissance, its manifestation can only be rendered in fantasy, as when Jacinta’s unearthly beauty is restored just before she dies, and the walls of her family’s house turn to glass, reminiscent of her own home in Palawan (158-159).
The employment of the fantasy mode to render this important scene should have succeeded in “infiltrating, opening spaces where unity had been assumed... [to] propose latent ‘other’ meanings or realities behind the possible of the known” (Jackson 23). But the subversive potential of fantasy in this crucial part of the novel, its “salamanca” is subsumed by another mode, a letter from Jacinta to her husband, which their son Antonio gives to Gaudencio after Jacinta’s funeral. The novel, in fact, ends with this very letter:

My dear Dencio,
After everything, you must know that I love you.
Yours,
Intang (159)

A single line is all it takes to reaffirm the ideology that fantasy temporarily subverts. After everything that Jacinta is made to go through and quietly acquiesce to; after the violent process of castration “the operation by which jouissance is drained away from the body”, is Gaudencio finally able to obtain her love? This concluding movement in the novel is actually more complex than it seems, and reveals multiple, contradictory findings.
While Jacinta’s jouissance was drained away from her [body], and important forces and drives were repressed in the name of marriage, in the process of castration, one must also remember that, as Lacan clarifies, castration is primarily a symbolic operation of language. Moreover, this operation of language produces surplus that cannot be dissipated entirely by castration, and this surplus manifests itself through language that is inexpressible; inexpressible in the sense that it cannot be take out of its source.
Therefore, on the one hand, it is possible to read the letter as an affirmation of Jacinta’s own desires; as Jacinta’s revenge, her way of punishing Gaudencio, giving him what he desires, but only from the grave. After imposing Gaudencio’s will on her, after draining away her jouissance, Jacinta leaves Gaudencio nothing but a dead woman’s words, the “element of the symptom that cannot be interpreted, that kernel of jouissance that cannot be drained away” (Evans 13; emphasis mine). What Gaudencio has is a declaration, not a demonstration.
On the other hand, this ambivalence is just what Gaudencio needs to restore his place in Jacinta (the Other) as her constant object of desire. By ending the novel in this manner, the text has also managed to show how Gaudencio has succeeded in inscribing himself in the Other’s desire, even if the Other can no longer demonstrate it. The fantastic, after all, “is literature in which definitive meanings are unknown: objects no longer serve transcendent purposes, so that means have replaced ends” (Jackson, 18). In other words, the domain of fantasy is the desire for, and not always the acquisition of, the object, as illustrated by the consistent character motivation of Gaudencio from the novel’s beginning until its end. It is in this sense that fantasy is “sovereign (only) in the desire for the object, not the possession of it” (Jackson 18).
Furthermore, if indeed “The presentation of impossibility is not by itself a radical activity since texts subvert only if the reader is disturbed by their dislocated narrative form” (Jackson23) another aspect worth looking into is the manner in which the novel Salamanca attempts to “dislocate” the narrative.
As mentioned earlier, the manifestations of fantasy, as a narrative mode, in Alfar’s Salamanca vary significantly from those in the other Filipino novels previously mentioned. Fantasy, as a mode that operates in the spaces between the mimetic and the marvelous – going by the definition of Rosemary Jackson, which this study anchors on –is not the dominant narrative mode in Salamanca. Except for one (Jacinta’s death in their family home), all the fantasy sequences in the novel take place outside the urban setting. In other words, it requires that something, in this case the sea, be traversed in order to get to the location of fantasy. In this novel, there is a portal between the real and the unreal that needs to be crossed for the fantasy to operate; a clear signal is turned on, to signify that one has gone beyond the realm of the real, of the mimetic. In other words, the space where the supposed fantasy is located is very distinctively, very clearly, not real. Moreover, it seems to be associated only with non-urban practices, rituals, and beliefs. Whereas, in the novels like Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café, or The Firewalkers, and particularly Cave and Shadows, fantasy exists in the ambiguous space between mimetic and marvelous, along an axis where there is no such thing as real or unreal, precisely because it is this notion which fantasy questions. Fantasy in the three novels is anti-real, while in Salamanca it seems more non-real, therefore closer to “marvelous”.
Another way that Salamanca’s dislocation of the narrative is not as radical as in the other novels is in the way it explores the mimetic ground. While, as in the other novels, Salamanca takes care to ground the narrative in a specific juncture in history, even making references to actual persons and actual newspaper headline events, the mimetic assumptions (which much of the best samples of fantasy are able to question and subvert through continual reversal) is presented here in a rather trivial manner. It is trivial in the sense that the historical context, despite several references to it, functions mostly as a backdrop, and mainly to achieve verisimilitude. In fact, the manner of integrating history into the narrative is done mainly through the fetishizing of common nuggets of knowledge.
Clearly, history is not the novel’s main concern. The novel, after all, is ultimately, a love story. The main narrative line – that of the couple’s life and love story – is one that could have taken place at any historical time and place in the Philippines, or in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Latin America, or in Ben Okri’s Africa. The development and trajectories that the major characters take are not much influenced by the sense of the country’s history that the novel, at different points, takes pains to render.
Moreover, despite the attempts to ‘dislocate the narrative form’ through the use of circularity rather than linearity, the ‘presentation of impossibilities’ through the use of fantasy, the rendering of ambiguity to character motivations, the novel falls short of becoming truly subversive, because of the reinscription of dominant patriarchal-capitalist ideology, as seen in the mobility, motivations, and in the affirmation of the will of Gaudencio, in relation to the other characters in the novel.
When it comes to works that employ fantasy as a narrative mode that is neither uncanny nor supernatural, neither mimetic nor marvelous, “a more subtle and subversive use of the fantastic appears with works which threaten to disrupt or eat away at the syntax or structure by which order is made (Jackson 72).” And when texts that employ fantasy as a narrative mode are unsuccessful in this aspect, they merely serve the purpose of affirming and re-confirming dominant, institutional order by defusing disturbing, unconscious impulses, and providing instead a safer, vicarious fulfillment of desire that effectively neutralizes the impulse for transgression and subversion. Salamanca does not quite succeed in the “subtle and subversive use of the fantastic”, but it is an important object of study in that it is illustrative of the dual expressive function of fantasy, where expression is seen in the sense of articulation, as well as in the sense of a neutralizing purgation of disturbing, potentially subversive impulses.

Works cited

Alfar, Dean. Ed. Philippine Speculative Fiction. Quezon City: Kestrel, 2005.
-- Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol 2. Quezon City: Anvil, 2006
-- Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol 3. Quezon City: Anvil, 2007.

Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Castillo, Erwin. The Firewalkers. Quezon City: UP Press, 1992.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minnesota: The Univ. of MN Press, 1996.

Escano, Miguel. ____________ (full citation to be added later)

Evans, Dylan. “From Kantian Ethics to Mystical Experience: An Exploration of Jouissance.” Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. ed. Danny Nobus. New York: Other Press, 1999.

Grigg, Rusell. “From the Mechanism of Psychosis to the Universal Condition of the Symptom: On Foreclosure.” Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. ed. Danny Nobus. New York: Other Press,1999.

Gullatz, Stephen. “Exquisite Ex-timacy: Jacques Lacan vis-à-vis Contemporary Horror.” 31 March 2001. .

Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Joaquin, Nick. Cave and Shadows. Manila: Anvil, 1983.

Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch. London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001.
---. “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch. London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001.
---. “The Signification of the Phallus.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. ed. Vincent B. Leitch. London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001.

Tadiar, Neferti Xina M. Fantasy-production: Sexual Economies and other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2003.

Yuson, Alfred. Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café. Quezon City: UP Press, 1988.

Zizek, Slavoj. “The Seven Veils of Fantasy.” Key Concepts of Lacanian
Psychoanalysis. ed. Dany Nobus. New York: Other Press, 1999.
--The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1998.

(COPYRIGHT BY THE AUTHOR, Daryll Jane S. Delgado, April 2008)

dear god, here we go again.

2008-06-07T01:34:00.000-07:00

please, please, please,
let me, let me, let me
get what i want this time.

(apologies/salamat to morrissey. this is my prayer for d., fellow libran and damon albarn-morrissey-sting-stipe lover)

i still love garcia marquez

2008-06-04T18:14:00.000-07:00

and i'm taking back everything i may have said to the effect that i don't anymore. i have recently finished reading Vivir Para Contarla (Living to tell the tale). i got my copy four years ago, as a gift from my cousin, but I only sat down to it last week. i read it overnight only because it is such a wonderful reminder of the world we are in when we read anything by garcia marquez. besides, he might not have long to live, and might not have much to write. god forbid. simba ko.

i'll post a more thorough review next time. or i might not, unless i find a way to detach myself a little bit more from the text. i can't help it, my response was -- as it has always been, when it comes to works of his -- very personal. and it goes back to the very first time i held a garcia marquez book in my hands. i can't help but associate it with so many other important things and events that are very personal to me as well. you see, my first exposure to garcia marquez was through One Hundred Years of Solitude. i still remember very vividly the day i discovered the book. it was my first day as a resident in kalayaan residence hall in UP. feeling like a millionaire, as i had just received, for the first time ever in my entire life of sixteen years, my entire allowance for the month, i proceeded to do a little book shopping at the booksale in the UP shopping center. and there it was, included in a pile of booksale books on super sale, its cover and title pages missing, but all the other pages still intact. i thought the title, which i just read from the header, was intriguing. i read the first few pages and, there is no other way to say it except to say that, they blew me away. i had no idea who garcia marquez was, what the book was all about, but as soon as i started reading it i couldn't stop. i decided to forgo sleep, breakfast, lunch, classes the following day (as i was bound to do for many more days and years to come). i was pleasantly shocked and embarrassed to find out later that garcia marquez was who/what he was and that, in my cousin's house , there was a shelf-full of garcia marquez books. and so, of course, i read all of them that entire semester. oh, and this is the same cousin who gave me my copy of Vivir -- see, there is a connection, some kind of organic unity here, after all!

Alagad daw… (or why I envy Voltaire Oyzon)

2008-05-16T22:04:00.000-07:00

I envy Voltaire Oyzon. I think I am more than a little jealous of him. He knows of what he writes, he owns the tool which he uses to write, his imagination knows no bounds, no hesitation, no fear.

Astig hi Voltaire. Diri ko ma-imagine kun gin ano niya pagbug-os hini nga mga siday, ngan maaram ako nga diri la ini asya it iya kaya suraton. No wonder, waray magruha-duha pag-translate para ha iya an makarit nga hi Merlie Alunan, ngan an iba pa nga up-and-coming writers, Janis Salvacion, Anna Laurice Jo, ngan Harvey Fiji, ngan an iba pa nga binmulig hini nga project.

Kamakauurit ni Voltaire. Kakakarit ni Voltaire. Grabe it imagination ni Voltaire. Grabe kay tungod nga kontrolado, pero malabad.

What I mean to say is, the imagination that the poems display in this collection is grounded in the only way that poems should be grounded: they create in the reader a secure and yet disconcerting feeling of being in touch with the a strange and yet knowable reality and with very personal sentiments. And, as a reader, you cannot help but feel very honored and privileged to be granted access to this writer’s reality and feelings, because the reality, rather, the realities that he offers, are rarely seen in Philippine poetry, perhaps because most of us cannot bear or afford to take stock of some of these realitie. Voltaire, on the other hand, stares at them, and engages in them, with eyes wide open, and with heart aflame. The realities that he offers are painful and beautiful. These are the realities of love and war, of globalization and ancient history, of poverty and natural wealth, of friendships and deaths. To say that what is most admirable about this collection is the emotional potency as well as the vulnerability of the poems, is to say that we are in the presence of a writer whose maturity is well beyond his years.

Umayon ako han tanan nga mga siday dinhi hini nga collection. Pero may mga special favorites ako. An akon mga paborito an mga siday nga may “conceit”, “wit”, “humor” ngan “irony”, an mga napabuyayaw, napa-tawa, napaurit, ngan napa-uga. May mga siday dinhi nga an trajectory han ira conciseness na-remind ha akon han mga metaphysical poets. May ada liwat mga poems nga napakalas an pagka postmodern nga iba nga klase, baga hin post-postmodern— mas matarom, mas “ironic”.

Gusto ko igtampalo ha mga napaka-postmodern na mga Filipino writers an iya “An Talipsay han Gugma” (“The Love Curve”), gusto ko iparayaw ha akon mga kilala nga writers na aktibista, ngan mga post-colonial nga kritiko, an iya simple, pero halarom ngan mapait nga “Didto ha Amon”, “Tawgi” ngan “Hi Salvador Magsusundalo” (Salvador will enter the Army”). May mga paborito ako, sugad han “Kan Toytoy pag-asoy han agsob nga karantahay ha ira balay”, nga diri ko gusto i-analyze hin duro, kay nadiri ako nga maruba. Instinctive it iya ginhuhugot nga response. Pa-uga ba. Siyempre, an title poem nga “An Maupay ha Mga Waray”, pa-uga liwat. Simple, bug-os hin duro, pero amo gihap, may trajectory nga napa-expand hit iya karuyag signgon, it iya meaningfulness diri contained.

Of course, if you do not speak or read Waray, some of the crispness, and the humor and irony, inherent in the sound of the original language are sometimes lost. But the translations are more than competent. In most cases, the translated versions stand on their own. The mere fact that Merlie Alunan did the translations for many of the poems here should be another big reason to get this book.

Pero an usa nga butang nga akon gud naayunan hini nga mga siday: an iya pulitika. The poems deal with such a wide range of subjects and emotions; they are carried by the various and varying voices of their speakers, but the politics of the entire collection is very stable, very clear. I will not name it. It is not for me to name it. It is enough for me that I see it. And I know you will too, and it will change you, when you read this book.

Nakaghuna-huna gud ako hin maupay kahuman ko pagbasa hini nga collection. Feeling ko bumaltok ako. Feeling ko may naabre nga gutiay nga bintana ha kalibutan, gutiay pero multifaceted, ngan importante hin duro, it “view” nga iya ginpapakita.

Alagad daw ano hi Voltaire. Kasumo. Kalabad. Kakarit.

april boys

2008-04-28T01:11:00.000-07:00

just had to have it

2008-04-14T06:32:00.000-07:00

my lost in translation moment.

after my mano po moment with cousin.

here's where i am, and here's how Bob Dylan does it

2008-04-09T05:17:00.000-07:00

according to an article on Vanity Fair (http://www.vanityfair.com/ontheweb/blogs/daily/2008/04/dylan.html)

Mint Julep: "Put the mint leaves, powdered sugar and water in a Collins glass. Fill the glass with shaved or crushed ice and then add bourbon. Top that off with more ice. I like to garnish mine with a mint sprig. Serve it with a straw. Two or three of those and anything sounds good!"

Rum-Cola mix: "Let me give you my recipe for a rum and Coca-Cola. Take a tall glass, put some ice in it, two fingers of Bombay rum, and a bottle of Coca-Cola. Shake it up well and go drink it in the sunshine!"

ahh. sounds like my kind of summer drink alright. having such tiny fingers though, i'd do it with four instead of two fingers. and i know that sounded very wrong. but who cares? i am in taipei and i am too shy scared sino-phobic (acdg to larry) to drink alone at the bar. so i've been salivating, sort of. i don't want to touch the minibar because it's a bit sad. i mean, i know i'd be sad after, drinking alone like that. but the night is young, we'll see... walked around for about two hours. okay naman. everyone has such thin arms and such slim legs.i do believe skinny pants were invented with these people in mind. looks really nice on the women, of course not on the men. the men just look uninspired and uninspiring, generally. i've been taking very inspired pictures of the women on the streets. i could easily have been this white balding man next to me, ogling the pretty taiwanese, from the safety of US territory: starbucks, of course. i've also been taking pictures of all these colorful foodstalls, but of course i dare not try them, i'm waiting for my cousin to arrive here this weekend so i can have someone to try all of them food, and maybe get allergies, with. haaay. there indeed comes a time in one's life, when one becomes no longer the adventurous spirit one thought one was, and one starts referring to oneself in this weird manner. (my pathetic attempts to sound like the mind of the old guy next to me). seriously, i find myself thinking of how things would have been so much more interesting if i were with, say, husband weng (not only because it is nice to be with husband all day, all night, always, but also because someone can take my picture with the prett girls in the background), or jet as in our macau audit, or tatay because he carries history lesons and trivia with him wherever he goes, or derek because we'd have a grand time minding people's haircuts and hoarding little electronic gadgets, or aimee because she can pass herself off as a taiwanese girl, or dennis because he is the real foodie, or dawn because we both have an insatiable interest and indefatigable faith in bargain shopping, and nanay becasue she is so snooty, it is always a worthy challenge trying to please her... oh well. now i am getting sad. i might as well give that mini bar more serious thought.

i have finally bound

2008-03-28T21:20:00.000-07:00

my thesis. and also myself, to everything i wrote in that manuscript. i am so exhausted. but also still a bit out there, i mean not fully here yet, not fully grounded yet. but here, i am sharing the concluding essay of that study, for joel and all the others who keep asking me about it and coming away from conversations with me still baffled about what i did, or tried to do, in my thesis.

From Narratives of Subversion to a Politics of Survival
(A Conclusion)

Every meaning-making act is a narrative. Every narrative addresses itself to a subject. Narratives facilitate and even function as accomplices in the ideological formation of the subject. The subject is ultimately the site of negotiation and disruption of elements of social economies and psychic systems. Narrative modes driven by unconscious desire – like fantasy – can function as a mode of subversion, undermining subjectifying notions and mechanisms purveyed by narratives that make use of the classic realist mode. These then are the basic premises that my study rests on. That this is a study focusing on fantasy as a narrative mode in relation to larger concepts of narrativity and subjectivity, as seen in a mix of previously studied as well as never-studied set of Philippine texts, is what provides it relevance. That this is a study making an attempt to theorize on fantasy and subjectivity as expressed across a good selection of Philippine contemporary novels and short stories in English, is its challenge.

The focus of my study is fantasy, and fantasy is such a common term, with many practical and varied uses. It is for this reason that what I have tried to do in this study is both easy and difficult. Easy because of the wide range of possibilities that the familiarity and commonness of the term lends itself to, and also difficult because the subject matter resists containment. What I have tried to do in this study is pretty simple. Among other things that I ended up doing in the course of this study: I explored the uses, definitions, and ramifications of the term Fantasy in the area of Literature, particularly Philippine Contemporary fiction in English, even as I was careful to always take into consideration the non-literary employment of the term.

Dictionary definitions of the term “fantasy” are usually divided into two categories. One is anchored on the notion of reality, which places the term “Fantasy” directly opposite to, or as an antonym of the nouns truth and realism, thus that of the imagination, as fancy, as invention, as make-believe. According to the Oxford American Dictionary (2007): Fantasy refers to “the faculty or activity of imagining things, esp. things that are impossible or improbable” and also to “the product of this faculty or activity”. It is interesting to note that, as the first set of definitions suggests, fantasy is both the “activity of imagining things” as well as “the product of this activity”. My study rests on this paradox: “fantasy” is a narrative mode which is both the activity of the unconscious as well as its product.

The second category of definitions, relate the term “fantasy” more directly to desire, particularly to that of aspirations, hopes, wishes, and dreams, as well as delusions and illusions. As in: “a fanciful mental image, typically one on which a person dwells at length or repeatedly and which reflects their conscious or unconscious wishes”. Even the early uses and the origin of the term “fantasy” also reflect this paradox. According to the Oxford American Dictionary (2007), the word’s etymology suggests a paradoxical notion of the term “fantasy” as both “imagination” which is invisible to the naked eye, but also “appearance” and “to make visible”.

Indeed, the very range of definitions and uses of the term “fantasy” already point to its being an ideal mode of questioning and of subversion. To a certain extent, this is what “Narratives of Subversion” has tried to illustrate. My study made full use of and derived, many benefits, and perhaps some bold suggestions for future literary and critical studies, from the varied and paradoxical notions, definitions and uses of the term fantasy. In order to give justice to the multiple uses and dimensions of the term, my own employment of the term “fantasy”, therefore, had to be derived from more than one discipline.

The main question that this study sought to answer was: “In what ways does fantasy, a narrative mode, operate as a mode of subversion in Philippine Contemporary Fiction in English from the 1980s to the present”. In relation to this problematique, my study also sought to answer these related questions:

1. What is the location of fantasy in relation to other narrative modes, both realist and non-realist, that are employed in Philippine contemporary fiction in English?

2. In what ways is fantasy a narrative mode driven by and constitutive of desire, operating within and as ideology?

3. In what ways does fantasy as a narrative mode make apparent/express, undermine, or subvert culturally [ideologically] dominant notions of subjectivity and representation?

Drawing heavily on the ideas of Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser (and their many interpreters), and taking off from the theoretical suggestions of Slavoj Zizek, Neferti Xina Tadiar and Rosemary Jackson, I attempted to examine the manifestations of fantasy in two sets of texts: (1) previously studied (if not canonical) Philippine texts, and (2) very recent (“pop”) fiction of young writers. The goal of the study was to interrogate a narrative mode that is generally considered as escapist, a mode for popular, “non-literary” , therefore “not serious” fiction. What I have tried to do is to articulate the subversive qualities of the use of fantasy as a narrative mode as seen in a cross section of both “literary” (academic) and so-called pop fiction.

The most apparent features shared by the primary materials included in this study are: the use of fantasy as narrative mode and similarity in structural characteristics; structure not only in the sense of narrative structure, but also in the sense of the ideological and unconscious that frame the texts. Moreover, this study finds that the structural similarities observed in the texts are among the manifestations of the employment of a fantasy mode and are likewise derived from, or driven by, similar unconscious desires.

Cave and Shadows by Nick Joaquin approximates the structure of a “whodunit” or a detective story, where the main narrative revolves around Jack Henson’s investigation of Nenita Coogan’s mysterious death. This narrative, however, is regularly interrupted by interpolating historical narratives, just as Henson’s search for answers is constantly disrupted by meaningless or irrational images, the nature of which remain ambiguous until the novel’s end. Fantasy in Joaquin’s novel manifests then in the spaces between official/rational narratives and those unofficial, but equally persistent narratives; in the sustained ambiguities of images that interpolate their perceivers, leading to the questioning of subjectivities; and in the repetition and reversals of characters across a period of four hundred years. The novel’s open ending, and unresolved ambiguities – seen in the destruction of old structures, and Jack Henson’s “broken” state— go against conventional notions of representation and subjectivity.

Alfred Yuson’s Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café and Erwin Castillo’s The Firewalkers are both historiographic metafiction texts that manipulate and eventually discard notions of unity of time, space, and character. Fantasy manifests in these texts primarily in their refusal to observe such realist conventions. They feature instead “spatio-plural” (mutiple) narratives, and fragmented and dismembered subjectivities. Moreover, these strategies are employed in order to counter univocal representation of history, revealing instead how, through the rendering of the locals as Other, and characterizing them as perennially “lacking”, the desire of the foreign elements in the community are revealed.

Dean Francis Alfar’s Salamanca attempts to ‘dislocate the narrative form’ through the employment of circularity rather than linearity, the ‘presentation of impossibilities’ through the use of fantasy, and the rendering of ambiguity to character motivations. While the novel falls short of becoming truly subversive, because of the reinscription of dominant ideology, as seen in the character motivations, and in the affirmation of the will of, Gaudencio in relation to the other characters in the novel, it succeeds in creating multiple subjectivities, and in displaying how fantasy operates in the configurations of desire.

The urban fantasy and ghost stories from Nine Supernatural Stories, Afraid, and Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol. 1 and Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol. 2, articulate the instability and decenteredness of the subject in highly contested, psychological spaces in the city. Fantasy in these stories operates in various ways and repeatedly attempts to make up for a lack resulting from constraints. In all of the stories taken up for this section, fantasy reveals the incompleteness and instability of subjectivity; how it is constantly constructed and reconstructed.

In Karl de Mesa’s Damaged People-Tales of the Punk-gothic it would not be too unreasonable to say that what are exhibited are manifestations of Philippine fantasy in the extreme. The stories in Damaged People are likewise set against an urban backdrop, but the city that is featured here is the city that we do not normally see in Philippine fiction. It is a city that has been eroded and corroded. It features characters that are non-repressed. Fantasy in these stories manifests itself as a mode driven by the most fundamental of desires.

These various novels and short stories show how fantasy functions in diverse ways, contingent upon the various ideological, political and economic determinants of the texts’ production. In the texts studied, the following qualities of fantasy were illustrated:

1. Fantasy as a narrative mode that operates in the hesitation between the mimetic and the marvelous;
2. Fantasy as literature of desire, which seeks that which is experienced as absence and loss;
3. Fantasy as literature of subversion, indicating or pointing to the seemingly precarious foundation of order;

Fantasy is at its most subversive, however, when it not only displays the construction of the subject, the castration complex, and repressed desires, but also when fantasy moves to change the relations and points of contact of the imaginary and the symbolic. In doing so, fantasy reveals the text’s unconscious, the ideology at work, and also provides spaces to disrupt the work of ideology, such as what is illustrated by the novels and stories that employ fantasy as a narrative. Fantasy, thereby, also provides for spaces and possibilities for radical, transgressive, cultural transformation by rendering the boundaries between realms (i.e., mimetic and marvelous, imaginary and symbolic, etc.) fluid and ambiguous; providing new or other subjectivities as a result of the reversal of the process of subjectification and a rejection of dominant modes of representation.

The findings of this study lend themselves to multiple readings as well: (1) that fantasy as a narrative mode is significant and necessary, beyond being a novel and exciting narrative mode that goes against realist conventions; (2) that contrary to the notion of fantasy as escape from reality, it reveals instead a more disturbing dissatisfaction, a restlessness, an indeterminacy within the subject; (3) that it is an ideal site of subversion, and may be recuperated for larger, more complex discussions of social, cultural issues on gender, class, and race, among others.

The framework that is offered in this study may then be used for a re-reading (and the recuperation of the subversive potentials) of older, neglected texts which make us of fantasy as a narrative mode. Likewise, it can be used to study the stories and novels in the fantastic that are being produced as of this writing.

Ultimately, the larger project of this study is to examine other ideological, “desiring practices” engaged in by the subject beyond those seen in fiction, and more towards material practices transcending the domain of art itself. This study offers the suggestion that what are now textual manifestations of the employment of fantasy as a narrative mode, may perhaps be read as a kind of “politics of survival”-- the ways and means by which the subject articulates his/her understanding of the ideological, political and economic determinants of his/her conditions.

Works Cited

Althusser, Louis. “From Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” New Historicism and Cultural Materialism – A Reader. London: Arnold, 1996.

Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch. London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001.

---. “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch. London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001.

---. “The Signification of the Phallus.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. ed. Vincent B. Leitch. London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001.

Tadiar, Neferti Xina M. Fantasy-production: Sexual Economies and other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2003.

Zizek, Slavoj. “The Seven Veils of Fantasy.” Key Concepts of Lacanian

Psychoanalysis. Ed. Dany Nobus. New York: Other Press, 1999.

--The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1998.

(Copyright by the author, Daryll Jane S. Delgado)

in the guise of an easter greeting

2008-03-22T22:03:00.000-07:00

this is really an attempt to contribute to (and confuse?) larry's theory on the body.

i remember how, as kids, we were careful not to get even a scratch during viernes santo and sabado de gloria, because the oldies believed that the wounds one gets on these days do not heal for an entire year. so we would wait all saturday night, hold vigil, until the clock strikes twelve, signaling the lord's resurrection, and life returning to normal. at exactly twelve midnight, we'd jump as high as we could so we would grow taller, and they would pinch our noses so we wouldn't be 'pango' when we grow up. of course, there are many other possible readings of these strange and questionable pagan-colonial practices. the point is: barthes is right on all accounts. it is all about the body. and we need to return to the body. isn't this the essence of the resurrection? it is christ's body that rises from the dead. the body is a necessary site of this great miracle, this fantastic operation. in the resurrection narratives, christ had to regain enough physical, bodily strength to push and slide open the heavy stone that was used to secure his tomb. he had to walk, not float, to where his friends were hiding, and he had to opens his palms to show the wounds, the holes that were created by the nails that were hammered into them. it is his entire body, not just his spirit, that rises up to the heavens and disappears from the earth. isn't this why we have to remind ourselves every year about his death and his resurrection? why we have to look at his bruised, half-naked body, hanging on the cross? this is to remind us, not only of christ's suffering, but specifically of the suffering his body was subjected to. (oops, mali ba? don't hurl those stones at me just yet. i can see father gogo rolling his eyes).

in this week's "annal's of war" in the new yorker, there is an interpretive news feature, titled "exposure", on the soldiers involved in the abu ghraib scandal, particularly on the one who took the photographs and posed with the pyramid of naked bodies. the essay ends, however, with an insight on the body, and on that particular photograph which has become iconic of the war against the war on terror. toward the end, the whole article manages to tie itself up with the western practice of venerating the body, christ's body on the cross, specifically. it makes a statement on how the body is really a site where we play out our desires, or something to that effect (mas maayo iyang pagkasuwat, lar, naturally), and how it is a reminder of just what we need to see, and all that we cannot afford to look at.

happy easter, everyone!

closure

2008-03-18T17:57:00.000-07:00

is crap. no one remains the same. people change everyday. all deaths are horrible. and the moon river is apparently wider than a mile.

***

my gulay naman. tama ba na you start the day with such dark thoughts? they're not mine. they're just random tv dialogue lines that interspersed with the tail-ends of my dreams just before i woke up. i have no idea which shows they came from or who said them. but i woke up with these thoughts firmly planted in my head, apparently with my full consent.

***

i am obsessed with bob dylan. my fingernails have cracked from my trying to play his version of "You Belong to Me" all day, all night, always (to husband weng's misfortune) on the guitar. the song is simple and sweet. and something that my mother and my aunt just happened to used to sing.

***

quite obviously, this post is just meant to fill space. so, a hot holy wednesday to everyone.

this time it's vintage

2008-02-22T08:37:00.000-08:00

music i'm listening to. and i'm putting this down here, just so i'll remember. may never pass this way again.

and this was exactly what i was looking for pala. been restless all evening trying to find the right music. then i checked out some itunes tracks that i had unchecked a year ago, not because i didn't like them (i love them! especially because it was sir butch who saved them there, when he very kindly agreed to get my macbook workin. yey). stopped listening to them for a while because they made me weepy, especially the ones my mother and her sisters used to sing as a trio. kanina i tried playing them again. okay na. i just had to imagine myself in a terry cloth robe, glass of scotch in hand, sitting in a dark veranda. in other words, as an over the hill, nostalgic prof or retired chess master, looking back on the highs and lows of his life. haha. don't ask me why. why old, why male, why lonely/alone. basta yun. this has always been my meaningless comfort ego/alter image. as a kid, one of my dreams was to be an old, retired male blues singer. what foolish revelations these are. to think that i had just participated in a very lively discussion earlier on the history and current status of feminism. before that, i had a very, very, very, wonderful surprise meeting with one of my literary theory crushes! and, of course, because i am an idiot, my tongue got all twisted, and basically i just came off as a crazy person. am wondering now if the song choice has anything to do with meeting rey ileto (THE rey ileto!) this afternoon. or listening to delia aguilar talk about the history of feminism/s, while her other half, epifanio san juan sat quietly among the audience, and took pictures very discreetly. haaay. it must be bad when things like this affect one's mood radically, when they become valid sources of happiness. am heeding a friend's wise advice: don't blog when smashed. so, good night.

Bach's Prelude: Cello Suite No. 1

2008-02-19T07:56:00.000-08:00

that's how it was all day today. started with a low, slow humming, like a hesitant warning, and then a more insistent sense of foreboding. i should have known. how could have i ignored the deceptively graceful running commentary. the day's events, to the littlest actions, flightiest thoughts, were laid out already. as certain as the visit, of the house robin, at our bedroom window. this has been happening more frequently. every morning. four, five days now. i think it is looking for itself. it has no concept of mirrors and reflections. it keeps hitting the window pane. it ignores what matters. the feast of scraps and crumbs of bread we lay out for it.

like being out of breath, even when you're perfectly still. that's how it was all day.

***
was it ning or larry who said that the best worst Bach to paralyze you is Air: Orchestral Suite No. 3. no, not for me.

***
at chateau verde, around seven pm, to wait for husband weng. perfect excuse. place was almost deserted. there was a light drizzle. insects buzzing. the moment was "a very clean well-lighted place". the waiters were huddled over the day's news. i was the only customer and i didn't want to be served. they wouldn't allow me to smoke. it was very cold. they offered to let me inside the kitchen to hide and have my cigarette and keep warm. i wasn't very responsive, or participative. they were frustrated, i think. finally left me alone. i texted e., just to say that life's a bitch, and i miss the old days, the old people, the younger us. i was sitting at the exact same place where i sat exactly a year and a half ago. i remember i brought mother's last pair of eyeglasses to the optometrist in shopping center that day. even if i knew very well that she no longer had any use for them. and i had sat at this exact same chair to wait and wait, and to try very, very hard not to think of anything. e. said that if he encountered his old younger self he'd bring him to the shrink, then he'd still end up meeting the old younger us. if i encountered old younger me i'd get her the hell out of here and bring her home, along with all she loves. then i'd teach her how to swim properly.

i mourn

2008-01-19T22:39:00.000-08:00

the death of bobby fischer.

used to have one just like this:

back when i thought i had a future in this sport. to this day, i have a... tendresse, you could say, for crazy old chessmen. their obsession and madness i will forgive. one of my most favorite nabokov novels is the defense, for obvious reasons.

BOOK the 9th of February!

2008-01-15T17:32:00.000-08:00

at 4pm, Fully Booked, Bonifacio High Street, Metro Manila, Dan Rhodes will be kicking off his 2008 tour with his first ever reading in The Philippines. Make sure you don’t miss this historic event. At the time of writing we are unable to confirm the rumour that if this reading goes well Rhodes will start thinking seriously about running for president.

Also, his latest book Gold is still available at all major bookstores. For more on it, please click on this link: http://www.danrhodes.co.uk/gold.html

Dan Rhodes in person.

Dan Rhodes is the author of five books:

Anthropology (2000)
Don’t Tell Me The Truth About Love (2001)
Timoleon Vieta Come Home (2003)
The Little White Car (2004 – writing as Danuta de Rhodes)
Gold (2007)

Here are some illustrious honours he has received:

Anthropology was shortlisted for the Macmillan Silver Pen award, losing out at the final hurdle to The Hill Bachelors by William Trevor. If you’re going to lose a short story competition to anyone, it might as well be William Trevor. At a break in proceedings, Rhodes had a dramatic tussle over a bottle of wine with someone he later found out was Harold Pinter.

Timoleon Vieta Come Home won the QPB New Voices Award in 2004. This was Rhodes’ first prize, and although he was mildly disappointed that he could no longer refer to himself as an award-losing author, he was, on balance, delighted to have won. He celebrated by going on the water dodgems at Coney Island, fatally damaging his brand new watch in the process. He had thrown away the receipt.

Timoleon Vieta Come Home also won the Authors’ Club First Novel Award in 2004. Prior to the ceremony Rhodes had been living the writer’s life and hadn’t been home for a few weeks, so he hadn’t read the formal invitation. Consequently he turned up dressed in his idea of smart clothing (i.e. not at all smart) while all the other men were dressed in tuxes.

Timoleon Vieta Come Home was also shortlisted for the Prince Maurice Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. It was included in Barnes and Noble’s Discover New Writers programme, for which Rhodes was presented with a Mont Blanc pen. He swiftly lost the cap, thereby rendering it useless.

Rhodes was also included in the London Evening Standard’s 2003 list of People Who Make London Swing. This is particularly impressive as Rhodes has never lived in London. And nor is he, as stated in the piece, the "son of a Devon bricklayer".

****

It should be noted that a recent Gallup poll revealed that there are an estimated 14,000 writers worldwide who share Rhodes’ name. He is not to be confused with the Daniel Rhodes who writes books about vampires, or the Daniel Rhodes who writes books about ceramics, or the Dan Rhodes who writes books about theology, or the Danny Rhodes who writes teenage fiction, or the character Sheriff Dan Rhodes in Bill Crider’s Western detective series, or any of the many other Dan/Daniel/Danny Rhodeses out there in bookland.

He is, however, to be confused with the beautiful Danuta de Rhodes.

He lives in Scotland, and looks like this:

All of these, and More earth-shattering facts from http://www.danrhodes.co.uk/

***

More importantly for me though, Dan's coming home with dear Emmily! And their son, Arthur William, aka Arturito Burrito (the last time I checked. I was told that he is known by many other names).

Happy times.

thank god for funny

2008-01-13T00:26:00.000-08:00

bloggers with the strangest preoccupations.

gives me reason to update this otherwise dormant site. just came across a couple of posts taking issue with something someone, a poet/event-organizer, i think, said about some unfavorable comment on the poetry event he organizes. that’s not the funny part. the funny part is how the “critics” took arms, with cries of down! down, with martial rule! screw the establishment! no to censorship! never again to dictatorship! oh my god. i mean, come on! there has got to be a major illogical gap here somewhere. must be the premise? first of all, when and where will you ever encounter a writer who will appreciate criticism, much less ask for it? not even in the most futuristic and speculative of fictions will it ever happen that a writer will say, please, please dear critic, criticize me, say bad things about me and my friends’ works, it would be a huge favor, that is exactly the kind of thing i need to improve my craft, to make me socially responsible, gender-sensitive, etc. secondly, if we readers/critics think the writer should be open to criticism, then shouldn’t critics also be beyond the writers’ responses to the criticism? because that is not our domain, as our friend pierre m. would say. the domain of the critic is the production of meaning; of positive knowledge (or connaissance) about the limits (or the unconscious) of a text; or an understanding of the conditions that result to the possibilities of a literary activity. my personal take on this? go for it, go for each other, guys! amuse me, please!

She woke up with a start

2008-01-02T18:24:00.000-08:00

to strange kitten sounds. Opening the window, she saw the culprit: Father cat, yawning at the foot of the stairs, gray and soft like the afternoon, unmindful of the kitties just behind him, hanging from a slab by their tiny paws. She balked at the cool, uncaring pose of mean Daddy cat. And where is the mom?

Living alone, she has not cried in years. And now this.

This family of cats, the ease of their coming into existence just like that; she curses the consequence of feline feelings: untutored hunger, wild warmth, madcap purring even in pain.

proposal went stale

2007-12-13T01:31:00.000-08:00

that's why i had to go through another oral proposal defense just this afternoon. it went really well. learned a lot. things seem even clearer now. i just love the no-fuss, direct-to-the-point approach my adviser takes with me. without my knowing it, i am pulling strung words out of my mouth and sounding like i had been munching on them for a really long time already.

the break

2007-12-07T07:28:00.000-08:00

that will not come because it is longed for and dreaded at the same time.

there. i think i have finally named it. the simplest version of which is: rushing home after class, for some alone time, because you do not want to get too sick of this place you work in, of these people you do love being with, only to realize that you cannot stand being alone with your thoughts either. you end up remembering too many things, things you should have done, used to want to do, had resolved to try to do. and right after that, what follows is a veritable guilt trip: what do all those things matter when, what's at the very base, at the very core has been unhinged? for good. your friend calls this place of absence the soul. you sometimes find yourself agreeing that it is, indeed. but then, oh, what petty, burgis concepts these are, you think. but you swallow, you choke on the truth at night, knowing that tomorrow is going to be no different from the day that just passed. that this "free time" is actually the most debilitating of forces. free, really, is just false. doesn't exist.

***

been thinking about what L said last night, about having lost the language for that which you want to write about. i think i know what he means. i told him this afternoon that it must be why i have been wanting to run away from what i think, and what i inevitably have to say. i want to listen. i want to watch. i want to read.

***

some five years ago i found myself working on what, in hindsight, i now realize to be a futile, even complicit task that involved farmers who were once agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs) but who had since lost those benefits through -- what i understand now to be -- technical manipulations of the very system that was supposed to have protected them. i got paid a really good sum for it.

three years before that, i did a series of stories on the women of quezon who had lost their farmer sons, brothers, husbands and fathers to intense militarization/terrorism in their area. i did not get paid a single cent for that series of stories, but, to this day, i find myself going back to that experience of the truest, purest pleasure, when i saw those stories in print. and without my name on them.

***

or, it can actually be made so much simpler: there are too many smiling faces in december, and it's freaking you out. a student in your freshman lit class died and you want to weep for his mother who had this loneliness about her that radiated, it was beautiful, and sick at the same time. you could see the cracks, and you could see how the cracks held her together. and how brokenness made sense in other people.

or simpler still: you miss your mother and, having to wake up, every single day, to her absence is terrifying it snuffs the air, the voice, all motions and emotions, out of you. there.

lacan would be proud.

the truth is, i haven't been

2007-10-17T11:45:00.001-07:00

sleeping, in the real sense of the word. in the sense i used to know of, and took for granted, my entire life prior to twelve months ago.

was complaining about this to friends -- eric, joel, vincent, lourd -- who probably couldn't have cared less. and i don't blame them, as they have found their own remedies for the same ailment. i thought that by speaking of it, blogging of it, i'd be cured of it. or, at the very least, they'd hand me a piece of the magical remedy. malas. none available.

they get it, don't get me wrong. husband weng gets it. (check his most recent blog post: reboot). but it's one of those things that we'd rather not talk about while enjoying real cold bottles of the cheapest beer in town, in a place which calls to mind a middle eastern romance (it's just along anonas road).

***

i just want to sleep. is all.

how we hung on to the great promise of the word

2007-10-08T07:48:00.000-07:00

made flesh.

and of this: "Only say the word, and I shall be healed."

how we compusively rolled and unrolled the outright promise in this line, like a carpet to cover unsightly fears, to hide the ugliest truth.

how we fidgeted in guilt and anxiety: did we say the right words? did we say them right? did we say them often enough? did we manage to say anything at all? didn't she herself whisper it, wrap it in her sighs, in the painful intakes of her breath?

oh, words.

cursed them, swore them off. and yet, and yet. the paradox of it all. can't curse them without using them, can't swear them off without cowering in their presence.

the word made flesh, indeed.

(reply to larry's post: Whatever it is you want)

this is what happens when you lock yourself in

2007-09-15T21:34:00.000-07:00

your tiny apartment, for an entire saturday, ignoring the beautiful windy afternoon, friends' invitations to dinner and drinks, wifely chores and teacherly obligations; as a way to celebrate and recall a mother's birthday and a daughter's short life: you realize that there are limits, that roles you value are contingent upon many things. you also realize that there is a sunday after saturday, that you can hold a conventional celebration with unconventional family and friends. and that stories are stories, and life is life.

***

thanks to ma'am jing, for helping edit this little piece. it's coming out in an anthology of modern tales.

The Other Daughter

It took years before it dawned on Anna that she was her mother’s creation. Creation as in brought into existence, manufactured from raw materials; a result of her mother’s systematic thought. No, not at all a figment of the imagination. A product. A being. A whole. Anna was named after her mother’s favorite sister, Aniana. She was created one stormy night, when her mother turned twenty-nine, eager for a daughter after having given birth to two boys. Upon learning this, Anna also instantly understood that she would only live up to the age of twenty-nine, a belief which her mother had laughed off, saying that Anna would live as long as there was life in her creator.

You see, Anna was the character in the stories Aurora wrote for the children. Anna was “The pretty little girl who loved to read books as much as she loved to play with her toys, the one who took naps at two in the afternoon after an episode of Sesame Street, who finished her vegetables before she asked for her candy, who fed and washed her pets once daily, who watered the plants morning and afternoon, who made her own bed, and said her nightly and morning prayers.” She was also “The poor little girl on whose head a colony of lice grew and overtook her entire body, because she played out in the sun all day and she refused to have her hair washed, combed and tied in a tight pony tail, so that she had to beg her fairy godmother to wave the colony of lice away with a wand, promising to never miss a day’s bath, to play out in the sun only when her mother allows her to.” Anna knew she was all those. When she and her siblings were young, her mother would read out loud to them from her little blue notebooks every night. Her mother would glance and wink at Anna at the start of every story. As soon as the soft, hollow voice would begin with “There was once a little girl…” a warm feeling would suffuse Anna’s entire body, and she would snuggle under her mother’s soft, smooth arm. Her mother would then secretly rub the top of Anna’s head with little sweeps of her chin, especially during the most engaging parts of the stories.

Anna was all those characters, yes. But she was also, quite specifically and concretely, the third child of five, with two boys before her and two girls after. Anna, therefore, was the one who got to braid her mother’s long, brown hair before her mother left for work. She got to assist her mother in the kitchen in the peeling and grounding of peanuts for the cookies, and in the mashing of potatoes, cream and butter in the aluminum tub. Anna was a character and a middle child, and she immensely enjoyed the privileges that went with that.

It was also because Anna was the middle child that, of all the children, she was the only one who was sent, perhaps as an experiment, to public school. There she was largely unseen. At first, Anna thought, it was not so much that they did not see her; it was only that they would rather ignore and tolerate her because Aurora, her mother, had been one of the most popular teachers in the same school. But after being part of, and remaining inconsequential in, several group games of patintero, water-water-go, and base-base, Anna seriously got to thinking. The confirmation came after a game of hide-and-seek when Anna realized no one had bothered to “seek” her. She had stood for hours, literally “hiding” in plain sight, her fat butt jutting out from behind a palm trunk, not noticing that it was already late in the afternoon, that the school grounds were empty, that the game had long ended. Anna became truly convinced that she was, in fact, unseen and unheard.

She continued to attend school anyway, even if no one saw her raising her hand to volunteer for an activity, even if no one heard her giving the correct answers to the most difficult questions. She eventually found the courage to ask her mother that she be allowed to continue attending school even when her mother had already left teaching. Anna’s mother had moved on to become first, a cashier in the government bank, then its first female Manager. After a few more years, she left the bank again to become the city’s first lawyer for women.

Unfortunately, Anna had to stop attending school when her mother started taking all those trips, giving all those talks, comforting all those women in all those different far places. Anna had to be by Aurora’s side, or close to her, in order to exist. Far from her mother and her mother’s mind, Anna got lost and ceased to be.

Anna learned her lesson when her mother went on a US trip with the husband. Anna refused to join them. She was enjoying her reading and her classes. School was much too important and fun then, as they were doing “Little Women” in English, “Mariang Makiling” in Filipino, geometric shapes in Math, and baking in Home Economics. Anna stood her ground: she did not want to go.

The morning that Anna’s mother left, Anna found that she could not locate herself either. She could not even leave the room to look for her mother because there were no room, no walls, and no boundaries, to mark the world she had been accustomed to. There were no voices, no air, no light. There was only a sensation of being let go, of being dropped, of disappearing into an abyss. It was the single most terrifying experience Anna ever had.

Anna later learned that on that trip, Aurora had been constantly nauseated and had fever and chills for three nights in sunny Santa Monica. The husband, a lawyer like her mother, there for a convention as well as a vacation, was much distressed over his wife’s condition. He was as devoted to Anna’s mother, as she was to him. Anna saw how they held hands in their sleep, and how, for all his position and power in court, he was almost as dependent on her mother as Anna was.

He was gentle-mannered, quiet, shorter by two inches than Aurora who was five feet and eight inches. He made up for his lack of height, with sharp aristocratic features and a quiet authoritative demeanor. And he was a loving, though at times distant, father to his children. Anna liked her mother’s husband very much, but could not love him, because she simply was not capable – it was not in her system. She loved her siblings because she shared their blood; there was, within her, a mechanism for that love. However, she could not get herself to call him, could not even conceive of him as, father. Simply because there was nothing of him in her. Anna was solely her mother’s creation. Anna knew, and didn’t mind, that he had absolutely no awareness of her existence.

But since that sorry, discombobulating episode, Anna never strayed far from her mother’s side again. That meant leaving school altogether, to be her mother’s personal assistant. School, by then, did not matter much anymore. Anna managed by doing her own reading, when she wasn’t helping her mother in her cases, speeches, and studies, that is. She didn’t mind working with her mother. To Anna, those were perfect moments. And the sense of being whole and complete in her mother’s presence was such that Anna would often forget she was a self at all.

There were, however, a couple of times when Anna felt like going her own way, living her own life. Anna once dreamed of becoming the writer her mother had stopped being. In her own time, at home, Anna wrote stories endlessly, some of which her mother submitted for publication. One piece came out as a children’s book with her brother’s illustrations, under her mother’s name.

Anna also constantly dreamed of singing, of being heard, of sharing her voice, which was exactly like her mom’s—low, full, somber at times times; teasing and joyful at others. Anna had no qualms, no false modesty, when it came to her singing. Often, while at work, riffling through documents, arranging files, stapling together pleadings and appeals, her mother would start to sing, and Anna would join her, their voices rising in an uncanny unison—always on the exact same notes, but from different pitches, and exactly an octave apart. Her mother jokingly told her, one morning, over breakfast, that they should both pursue a career in singing. And they both laughed over the absurdity of this idea. But Anna knew, as her mother also did, that there was an undercurrent of something akin to pain, whenever she sang, knowing that her voice would never be heard by anyone else. It was through Anna’s singing, one day, that her mother suspected that Anna had fallen in love.

Aurora was right. Anna had fallen in love. The mechanism for love that was built inside Anna was set in motion in a way both strange and yet familiar. It was as though there were a part of the man she loved inside her. He was working as part of her mother’s staff, while trying to finish law school. Anna loved the way that the presence of the calm, reserved, young man, seemed to stabilize her mother. Anna even suspected that a big part of her being in love was influenced by this effect he had on her mother. He was, in turn, dedicated to Aurora; sometimes much too dedicated to her. Like most everyone her mother worked with, he was inspired to please her, to measure up to standards he wasn’t even sure existed. There was something in her mother that directed people’s behavior towards her; she was a subtle but powerful force. It was not only her beauty, it was her certitude; a certitude devoid of condescension. What Anna loved about him was that he was not fazed at all by this force that was her mother. He was not indifferent to it, he thrived in it.

He was lean and willowy; androgynous, even effeminate at times. He had long fingers that looked like they were trained on old piano keys, or had spent much time plucking and strumming nylon guitar strings. Oh how Anna had wanted so much to feel him and to be felt by him. Several afternoons and many dawns did Anna spend trying to summon all that she had and all that she was, in order to make a dent in his consciousness, to exist even as a mere whiff in the air he was breathing. But, to no avail. This broke her mother’s heart, too, Anna knew. The man eventually left her mother’s organization, married some nice young girl, moved to New York to pursue a career in immigration law. And he was slowly, eventually filed away, forgotten like an old, passionately argued, but hopelessly lost case.

Anna was able to return to the soothing rhythm of living with her mother. This was only disrupted when her brothers and sisters, one by one, left home to pursue their own lives. Anna suffered most, because she also suffered with and for both Aurora and Aurora’s husband. Much as Anna desired, she could never make up for the sense of emptiness the leaving of the children created in the couple.

Anna was with Aurora and her husband in Dr. Villegas’s clinic when, after a series of annual routine tests, it was confirmed that her mother who had just turned fifty the day before, suffered from an advanced stage of breast cancer. Upon hearing the news, her mother’s heart closed up, the act resulting in an instant quieting in the room. So drastic was the shutdown that Anna heard it very distinctly. In the heavy silence, she ran to embrace Aurora’s stiff body. At the same time, she wanted so much to reach out to Aurora’s husband, to help stop what she knew was the wild swinging of the pendulum crashing against the walls of his heart. She could see it in the lividness of his lined face, even as he himself tried to seem cool, struggled to clear his mind, to make sense of what he just heard. It was only much later, when they got home, that Anna allowed herself the kicking and screaming, the absolute childish resistance, the total lack of restraint, that she had been tempted to give in to while at the hospital.

Soon after, Aurora’s children came home—left their jobs, relationships, schools—to be with their mother, and Anna was glad that they were a family again. Her siblings had become different persons. They had been brought up on love, and had much of it to give. Their presence in the house hastened Aurora’s recovery. Her mother survived the first cycle of chemotherapy. When she was tested again, she was declared clear of cancer cells.

Everyone then insisted that her mother quit her job, give up her fights, learn to relax. Anna, however, understood her mother’s apprehensions about living a purely domestic life. She was convinced her mother should be allowed to live her life the way her mother saw fit. And despite the abatement of the scare over her mother’s health, Anna’s conviction about her own life ending at the age of twenty-nine was starting to influence her actions, decisions, and even dreams.

In the years that followed, everyone resumed his or her life, albeit with some adjustments. Debts had been incurred, some properties had to be sold, in the course of their mother’s treatment. This put a lot of pressure on the husband and wife who had reputations and public images to keep up. Both spent more and more time at work than at home. The fights her mother engaged in became bigger, the stakes became higher. Anna suffered from her mother’s involvement in these legal battles. The less Aurora thought of her, the more difficult the struggle was for Anna to exist unseen and unheard. As Anna neared the age of twenty-nine her dreams also became more strange, more terrifying. Because she knew they were real. They were going to prove themselves real.

On her own, Anna started to grieve even before the deaths and losses occurred. She tried to get used to the idea of the approaching tragedies by writing about them. Her heart bled as she wrote of the confusion and panic. And as she wrote, she herself had to struggle to breathe under the threatening cloud her characters could not escape. The thought of the family breaking apart, of losing someone, haunted the family, underlining their normal conversations, the last few meals they took together in the hospital room, the laughter they shared over some TV sitcom, the last hugs, and nonchalant caresses. After writing the story in her mother’s blue notebook, Anna braced herself for the worst.

Exactly eight years after her mother was declared a survivor of the disease, a growth the size of an orange was found in her mother’s upper left lung, along with several others in her vital organs. The cancer cells ravaged her body and her senses fast, but could not break her composure. Aurora managed to hide her pain most of the time—she kept her back straight, sat cross-legged, even if someone had to help her lift one leg so it could be crossed over the other. It was because her mother was very good at hiding her pain that everyone started believing in miracles instead of the doctors’ prognosis. The doctors would try to tell them that the mother might not have long to live, but the kids would just say, yeah, yeah, so? They have seen their mother bounce back from the worst bouts. They knew her better than anyone else did.

Anna’s dream of a few years before started to play itself out. By the time they celebrated her mother’s her fifty-eighth birthday in the hospital, everything was a potential source of pain—the littlest chink of light, the merest sound, the slightest evidence of smell.

One September night at the hospital, with everyone in attendance for dinner, a strong typhoon struck the city, rendering it pitch black, and keeping everyone stranded in the hospital room. Extra beds had to be wheeled in, pushed right next to Aurora’s own bed. Despite the strong typhoon tearing the city to pieces, the family found something gay in the occasion. It brought back memories of home, years ago, when they were all young, and they would gather round their mother for one of her stories. They recalled some of Aurora’s stories, and, hearing them, Anna’s body was suffused with warmth again.

The situation lifted everybody’s spirit, emboldened them not only to recall the past, but to look forward. Christmas plans were tossed around in the dark room, even ridiculous ones, like the father’s suggestion that they celebrate the holiday during the entire months of November and December. Laughter rang out. Anna clutched at her mother’s left arm the entire night, even as she joined in the laughter and gaiety, trying to ignore the rapid beating of her own and her mother’s heart.

After the laughter and bantering had died down, and only Aurora’s labored breathing was audible, Anna could not sleep. She was certain now that they were going to lose their mother that very night. Knowing that it was going to happen very soon made the knowledge new again to Anna: she was literally nothing without Aurora. This woman was her creator, her God, her Self.

Those were Anna’s last thoughts before she somehow fell asleep.

In the morning, the storm died down to a light drizzle, rendering the scene outside in a milky haze. The room itself was bathed in soft gray. Everyone was still in deep sleep. Anna woke up and glanced over to her mother lying on her side, her right arm still entwined with her husband’s. Anna knew it was up to her now. Anna was, after all, Aurora’s character, and specifically the middle child. Anna was as good at this, as her mother made her out to be. She closed her eyes and recalled her dream.

Aurora is starting to stir. There is a calm, knowing smile on her face, even if there are still traces of sadness in her eyes. She stands on the bed, finally able to extend her limbs after several months. She bends over to kiss her husband, and then each of her children. She then carefully steps over their sleeping bodies to reach for a hairbrush, which she briskly runs over her hair. Then, she pulls open the drawer of the side table, to search inside for her wedding ring and her sunglasses.

It is while her mother is in the act of putting on her sunglasses and testing the strength of her legs, flexing her feet, that Anna awakens fully. At first she does not comprehend the scene before her eyes. She sees her mother carefully but confidently padding her way to the windows, drawing the curtains to the side, sliding the glass panes open, and stepping on to the sill, standing still to breathe in the cool breeze.

Anna scrambles to her feet. She barely has time to smooth her own hair, put on shoes, before Aurora motions for Anna to join her at the window.

In a while, her mother’s attending nurse comes into the room, walks over to where her mother’s body is, still wrapped in her husband’s embrace. From the window Anna and her mother look on worriedly, helplessly, as the nurse taps the man on the shoulder lightly. The others stir and awaken with the vague sensation of last night’s gaiety and laughter still clinging to their senses...

Anna opened her eyes, took one last breath, and braced for flight, as she heard the doorknob being turned, softly announcing the imminent entrance of her mother’s attending nurse.

And so it was that at the age of twenty-nine, at exactly half her mother’s age, at exactly the same age her mother was when Anna was created, the unseen and unheard life of Anna, Aurora’s character and middle child—the other daughter—ceased to be.

QC/Sept. 01-02, 2007

eagleton saves the day

2007-08-22T21:40:00.000-07:00

got my copy this weekend! it immediately took its rightful place on top of a very exclusive pile (for our reading pleasure, and as sanity restorer) in the most private part of our teeny tiny apartment. must be the reason why i've been taking longer walks, and stubbornly writing fiction in the thickest of thesis work. meaning!!! meaning!!!

sometimes, i want to

2007-08-22T12:07:00.000-07:00

get away

see new colors, gaze back at old structures

open new windows, look out to other cities

move to new rhythms, sway to slower beats

(just looking for excuses to post photos i took last march, actually. really. it is true though that i am
itching to run away again. but at the same time am more intent on staying to take care of old business.
and drink on the side.)

like being in a loop

2007-08-17T01:43:00.000-07:00

that's how it has been these last couple of days. totally non-linear. and in a not very entertaining way. in fact, in the worst ways possible; random and intrusive. yes, a loop. not a link. a link has two different ends. this one that i am in, and the ones that keep intruding, seem to belong to a viciously closed curve, whose initial and final points, god forbid, but i know they do, coincide in a fixed point. i do not know which threatens more, getting to that point where everything coincides, or being subject to the dizzying shifts within the curve.

a character in a martha grimes novella who likes to watch people get on and off trains says that memory, by nature, is painful. i know it was written in a less trite manner, and probably in relation to movements through time and space. but i also know that things are bad when only the trite phrase stands out against a pagefull of beautiful lines.

so then, there are things that just have to be done to make things better. distractions are welcomed. instant celebrations of friends who won the palanca are held in the small apartment. about three foreign language films are viewed per day with the husband. cheesy folk songs are sung with friends, on the veranda, at four in the morning, while the storm prepares to rage at us. every word on writing tarantino says during his short talk is relished (because it is refreshing to hear somebody so unabashedly declare himself a serious writer, no matter if his writing is not taken seriously). and, whenever possible, the most elaborate, time-consuming meals are prepared, never mind if they're consumed within only a tenth of the length of time it took to prepare them. these things just have to be done.

yesterday was a day spent

2007-07-25T05:40:00.000-07:00

on the train!

enough said.

***

i managed to read an entire theory book on the romantic-fantastic while i tried to ignore people getting on and off the train. rather, as i tried to not pay attention to them trying very hard to ignore me.

i also managed to exorcise some demons, my personal issues with this particular railway train line. not quite a breakthrough. but something, quite something. you know how you sometimes don't want to see yourself through it because of the break that it involves? i am at that point, exactly.

then i met up with L at cubao, since the original plan - to meet each other in one of the station platforms - turned out to be not as simple as it sounded, after all. like me, he sort of tortured himself all afternoon as a way to pleasure. (haha. sorry, am i projecting?) his mode of punishment was to obsessively go through an entire floor of tall, wide shelves of books for hours. and then to lug around a heavy load of books the rest of the afternoon. we got A. to join us despite her apprehensions about the uncanniness of us being in cubao at the exact time she was planning to be there.

well, we confirmed her worst fear: that the night would end with husband weng putting away empty bottles of wine, and her and L walking the short distance to their own homes from our place, just slightly more inebriated than planned.

***
i have just been told by my thesis adviser that my manuscript reads like creative non fic. i remember my fic being called theory-laden, and also being mistaken by adam as creative non fic. obviously, i have issues with genre and differences. i wonder if it's too late to care. i only know i'm too lazy to care.

what's bad is corny

2007-07-21T03:08:00.000-07:00

is what sir butch told me one time. kakatawa. true e. the worst thing anyone could ever say about your work is that it's corny. so much less of a worry when people don't understand your works right away, or even when they contest certain turns of phrases here and there, complain about the lack or profusion of complex expressions of thought. as long as they don't call it corny, then there's still reason to plod on. this thought crossed my mind again last night at kublai's, while we were talking about MG's latest works, which are never corny. difficult, yes. opaque, sometimes. dangerous, often. interesting and playful, always.

corny is bad. what's bad is corny. thank goodness, i've never heard this said of my own efforts. perhaps it's been said, i just never heard it. no matter. they've been called many other things. some potentially hurtful, mostly harmless.

my real life though thrives in the corny and the camp. my family is corny. my parents have a theme song. we have a family theme song. we put on musical productions, video presentations. and i love it that we are corny that way. i used to be embarrassed about it, until i realized that the excessive corniness in real life is actually wonderful. they have a way of marking events, occasions, moments that memory would otherwise have a difficulty grasping. corny is deadly only on the page. otherwise, it aids in making memory come alive, especially when there is a lack of shameless laughter, or crying; when everyone's always trying to be cool about things. i love the real, the lived, so much more than the written now. so i'm fine with corny already.

here are the lyrics to some of those songs we have claimed as our own. (all of them were popularized by frank sinatra. now i know. obviously, my father's to blame.)

"Day by Day"
(Stordahl/Weston/Cahn)

Day by day Im falling more in love with you
And day by day my love seems to grow
There isnt any end to my devotion
Its deeper dear by far than any ocean

I find that day by day youre making all my dreams come true
And (so) come what may I want you to know
Im (that I am) yours alone, and Im in love (in love) to stay
As we go through the years day by day

(I said, day by day)
(as we go through the years day by day)

"The Best Things In Life Are Free"
Georger Olsen

(Charted in 1927 by George Olsen at #3 and by Frank Black at #16
Charted in 1948 by Dinah Shore at #18 and by Jo Stafford at #21
Also charted as a duet by Luther Vandross and Janet Jackson in 1992 at #10
Words and Music by B.G.DeSylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson)

The moon belongs to ev'ryone
The best things in life are free
The stars belong to ev'ryone
They gleam there for you and me

The flowers in spring
The robins that sing
The sunbeams that shine
They're yours, they're mine

And love can come to ev'ryone
The best things in life are free

"Here's that rainy day"

I should have saved
Those leftover dreams
Funny
But here's that rainy day
Here's that rainy day
They told me about
And I laughed at the thought
That it might turn out this way
Where is that worn out wish
That I threw aside
After it brought my love so near
Funny how love becomes
A cold rainy day
Funny
That rainy day is here
It's funny
How love becomes
A cold rainy day
Funny
That rainy day is here

revised: Non-creative flash fiction

2007-07-05T08:11:00.000-07:00

Conversation

Stepping out of the compound, we shiver, and then cringe, as we hear the rusty gates complain. “It’s Sssibeeria,” you say. A whiff of your brandy voice descends to, bounces off the slope of Matahimik Street.

“The ice is melting there, the death of ice,” you add, smacking your lips, inhaling deeply. The empty bottles in the bag you’re carrying rattle and jangle as they knock against each other and hit the side of your thigh. You are swaying. The ground under our feet is heaving like a tentative wave.

It makes me think: Surely that swaying moon, smug with the knowledge of melting, knows about this, this death of ice. I don’t know why I think that thought though. I don’t know now why I had thought it would be a good idea to get drunk— and not just drink, but get drunk— with you tonight. I don’t know why we got married. I thought we had agreed to be married to ourselves, and date each other on the side. I thought we were going to travel the world, help the poor, write novels. I don’t know why we both ended up as teachers. I don’t know why I am starting to hate hearing, listening to, pronouncing words.

“The streets are clean, well-lighted,” I say instead, laughing a little at the lame attempt at allusion.

“What?” you ask.

“Oh, nothing.”

“I wass stalking about Sibeeria, I mean talkings abouts Siberia--”

Yes, yes, I hear you, as I hear the seas sigh. Something in me is going to give, finally.
I think about the glass of ice swamped with soda and brandy. And I know why I think that thought. I think this, too: What I’d like to do right now is to grope in the shadows for your hand.
I feel there’s something wrong here. Left alone in the cold our fingers might go blind!

Meanwhile, you continue, “But then again, it’s after midnight…” Again, I think: It is in quiet hours that hands learn to master the spaces and the lengths, the curves and the coarse lines of fates. And we will ask ourselves much later, years and years from now. I, still lonely, drunk, by then much older, woman. You, still brooding over matters, still teacher, husband, man.

What the hell has Siberia got to do with us?
What the hell has Siberia got to do with us?

“Well, I’ve read that sssome eleven people…”

Oh my god, you’re still at it. Some eleven people have what? Turned away from the cold to seek the warmth of hell? As in this conversation, perhaps, the molten syllables will make their way smoothly down to settle in the memory of my throat.

And why the hell am I thinking in extended metaphors?

“But since we’re in the tropics…” You go on, and on, and on.

I wish you’d stop.

I take my clammy hand out of my pocket and reach for yours. It encounter’s glass, steel,
bottles of beer, and withdraws from the contact.

“Oh, oh, and you know? The waves?” You nudge me with your left elbow, and the bottles in the bag rattle again.

I face you. And then I tell you: “Yeah, I know, I hear they, too, mourn the deaths and desperately try to freeze in mid crash.” And then I dash down the street.

“What? Hey, where are you going?”

I stop at the nearest lamppost, lean heavily against it, and puke. Finally. You reach me, breathing short, heavy breaths. Your face is red. Your eyes are alive likie they have never been before. You seem to me magnified by some strange force. I look away, to the direction of the 7-11. The brightness of the store softly illuminates the entire block. I think of Alfon’s short story, the one which has beautiful, vulnerable children in them. The story has nothing to do with us. We do not have children. Else we would not be drinking like this. Almost every other night.

“You okay?”

“Yes. I’m good for four more. And then no more.”

You join the bag of bottles in your right hand with the other one in your left. The bottles clatter and jangle like mad. And then it’s quiet again. You extend your right hand. I take it. We walk down Matahimik Street.

tomorrow will be

2007-06-29T21:19:00.000-07:00

exactly nine months since the big quiet shutdown.

it's not so much that the past keeps intruding, really. it is that there is this door and i keep opening it, i am the one who keeps intruding. because i just can't help it.

***

was talking with friends ruby and easy last night about the big three-oh. and how it does things to you. to your heart, mainly. softens you up, somewhat? creates new fears and anxieties, maybe? i think at some point we three agreed that in the end it is all good and exciting, really. 'cept that mine, when it happened, just came and went. am all the better for it, i guess. a much bigger thing extending beyond myself happened. no, actually signalled the end of a life, of the world, of things ever happening. in a manner of speaking. in many manners of speaking. so, i never actually turned. 30 just came by and left in a huff.

photos fr the last party

2007-06-23T03:46:00.001-07:00

we gave. there should have been more, i could have at least taken one shot of each group, if i didn't do a k.t. and disappear for almost an hour. fun yung party because everyone got drunk. isn't that the main objective all the time?

here:

i know i promised to wring the neck

2007-06-23T03:21:00.000-07:00

of the person who will give me such an advice. but k, who happens to amuse me no matter what he does, gave the advice. and it was given so nochalantly, so meaninglessly, that i have no choice but to take it. once again, i was amused by people's capacity for cliche. and that's enough for me to get by these days. so here it is.

****

i have only dreamt two memorable dreams since we moved in to this tiny apt (na nagpapanggap na townhouse). both of them had to do with my mother. in the first one, i don't see her but i know she is inside the house, or the room. and the rest of the dream is too personal for this space. but just so i won't forget, and just so i can say i took the advice, the dream had people in them, lots of people. it had some screaming. a lot of anger. and certain lines that would put the sappiest soap operas to shame. in the other dream, she is about to say something, or she has asked me to say something to someone, and then i saw this wound in her forehead, and it started to spread into blue-black vines across her face. when i wake up, i am all sweat and panic and feeling like i was supposed to be somewhere, do something. and then i realize it was all a dream. and i want to go back into it.

there has got to be a cure for this

2007-06-23T02:48:00.000-07:00

malady, this aversion to speech, she thinks. she knows she has written of this here before, perhaps many times already. is she fascinated with it? is she secretly entranced by it? i have read somewhere that the way people deal with intrusive thoughts, fixations, is to naturally develop another one in the belief that this new neurosis will somehow mask the effects of the first ones. don't we see this all the time in each other? the more we protect ourselves and each other, from our selves and other people, the more suspect we and our intentions are. the more she talks and converses and comes up with quips and funny remarks the more her stomach turns. the bile rises. i see it happening all the time.

i suspect that this stems somewhat from her protracted thesis work. she knows she should let it go already, but here she is, tweaking and cutting and restructuring again. it will never end, if it were only up to her. thank goodness there are such things as advisers, and penalties, and tuition fee increases, otherwise... otherwise! but she hates what she has done thus far, and yet cannot let it go. she hates the fact that it is meaningless and useless. full of words. she balks at the lines she's strung together, packed into pretentious stand-alone paragraphs. she wants to hang the person who thought up those arrogant, flimsy, inconclusive findings. she wants to shoot those who produced the worst of them books, which she had to read and reread and apply herself to. she wants to gather all the words, tie them up real tight, and then, and then violently pull them apart.

i suspect that this stems not just from the thesis work. i suspect that this is borne of those moments she felt most inutile, words were most inutile. when there were only images and no words. when there were words but no meaning. when her body should have been acting without thinking, and then the thinking just had to come along, comanding the body to move, the face to break into a human smile, the eyes to flicker once in a while. the commands were always packaged in words.

reply to dyndyn's rage

2007-05-28T08:01:00.001-07:00

i accidentally came across an article on the Burgos disappearance in the Philippines Free Press last week. grabe. this leadership has absolutely no sense of respect, no redemption, no remorse. the actions of those who carry out the orders are but pale reflections of those who gave them out. that totally incredible tale they spun-- about how members of the community actually stole the plates of an impounded car parked in the miltary camp, and attached it to that other car used to abduct Burgos, in order to frame the military-- is just too much! they don't even have the brains and the conscience, to come up with a feasible, sound story. pusa.

author/article spotlight:

2007-05-28T08:01:00.000-07:00

here's an essay on a mother by a son who was also her fan, colleague, and critic. the essay is insightful and informative, to say the least. what's most remarkable about it is that it is written in a way that is restrained, unsentimental and yet vulnerable at the same time. susan sontag fans will be glad. but will also want more, more, more on this extraordinary thinker and writer. check it out: "Remembering Susan Sontag" by David Rieff(http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2007/winter/rieff-remembering-sontag)

***

i did not know that david rieff was susan sontag's son. i had come across some of his so-called "travel essays", but which were actually more about public policy, identity and migration. i remember he offered curious perspectives. he sounded a bit like robert hughes (of the "shock of the new" fame): very white, very male, in a sense, but extremely engaging and always sensitive. i guess we have susan sontag to thank for these other traits. if not for the mother, the son would have just been very white, very male.

the dynasties are crumbling

2007-05-22T03:01:00.000-07:00

everywhere, but in tacloban. how very, very sad. someday, i am going to process my thoughts and feelings (aww!) about the elections, and write about it. and it will be heartbreaking to no one, unforgettable only to me, and beautiful only to god. =)

***

i am looking at early 90's photos of my dance troupe, recently posted on the web. and i am trying to reconcile the image of the thin, wiry girl with the wide smile, with this other one at the keyboard. the feeling is strange. everyone in the photograph is strange. indeed, people are strange when you're a stranger. someday, i am going to process my thoughts... wait a minute, didn't i just type this same line minutes ago?

would it be considered lying

2007-05-19T00:21:00.000-07:00

if you raised your hand in answer to the question: "do you know how it feels to be limbless?"

author/book spotlight

2007-05-18T06:37:00.000-07:00

"Winner of the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the City of Vancouver Book Award, and a Regional Finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book

Longing, familiarity, and hope suffuse these stories as they mine the charged territory of relationships – subtly weaving in conflicts between generations and cultures. Madeleine Thien’s characters in some way want to make amends, to understand the events that have shaped their lives. A young woman searches back in time for the pivotal moment when her family lost faith in itself. Two sisters keep a vigil outside their former house, hoping their long-absent mother will appear one last time. A wife helps her husband grieve for the woman he has loved since childhood. A daughter remembers the simple ritual she once shared with her father and the moment when her unconditional love for him was called into question. Compassionate and revealing, delicate and wise, these stories chart the uneven progress of love and lay bare the heartbreaking truths at the core of our closest bonds." (www.mcclelland.com)

the blurb does the book a great disservice. trust me, the book's so much less fuzzy and so much more astig than it's made to sound.

it's been so long since i've been pleasured by (yes, pleasured!) by a found book. most of the books i now admit to be favorites were "found", and my memory of how i "found" these books astonishes me, sometimes. when i recall the act, the circumstances that led, the forces that conspired to, my having "found" them, the memories become as powerful as the books themselves.

i found this book in a bargain books stall located in the basement of sm-cubao. h.w. and i were there to look for an outdoor tent, for our family cemetery lot in tacloban. my siblings had this idea of holding a picnic at the memorial park on mother's day, hence the tent. but this book is what we found instead. along with another cool find, a very interesting memoir written by j.d. salinger's daughter. (i didn't know i had a sister!) in a sense, the books we found, and the decision to get them instead of the family tent we were supposed to buy, did not stray from the day's theme.

i have another new curse

2007-05-11T17:09:00.000-07:00

last year it was tuta as in tutang ina, now it's pusa! as in pusang ina!, or ay, pusa!, or pusa nga yawa! it's a very satisfying four-letter curse, very versatile, good, forceful impact if used appropriately. you get away with not saying bad words in front of the children, but let off steam in an equally satisfying manner. try it! you'll see... =)

it all starts with one

2007-04-23T08:12:00.000-07:00

and will never ever end with just that one bottle. arrgh!!! don't get me wrong. i love lightning parties, and all that they entail and result to. love 'em! i just hate myself for not being astig enough to go on hiding under the blanket with H.W. all day the following day, for not being astig enough to say fuck that i don't need to go to work today, i deserve to sleep all day... because we ended up drinking just a sigh before sunrise. hahay. the things we can't help from doing, the help we can't ask for, or give. hahaaaay. i rambled in class for a total of fifteen minutes this morning, before S. took over for her demo. buti na lang. mind was mush and pulp bits. in my head all i could hear of myself was "ok, what do you think? and you, what do you think? you agree? aha. hmmm. what about you? poetry, slurp, slurp, speaker, tone, slurp, slurp, zzzzz..." i was soooo relieved to give way to S.

i know i say this all the time, but... i will never, ever, EVER, work the day after a good drinking session. just ruins the experience.

***

woke up from a most-needed nap, recalling lingering bits and pieces of the conversation i had with H.W. and L. last night. it was about that particular sense of loss - mingaw - which has no relief, no logic, no beginning, no end, no weight, no height, no shape, but takes up a lot of space. and is the only matter that makes everything else cease to matter. a matter of absence that is so present, and permanent. and you know how it is when you wake up to dusk just settling in. and the thoughts you have upon waking, they just totally set the darkness of the tone for the rest of the day. mamingaw!!!

jet lag

2007-04-14T06:25:00.000-07:00

is something i never have to deal with after a trip abroad. not that there's a significant time difference between the phils and the few places i go to. not that i travel a lot. in fact, i've only been to one place with that much of a time diff compared to ours. it's just that i've always wondered what it is all about, exactly. i am a bit fascinated with it. okay, not just a bit, a lot. i've been preoccupied with time differences and relativity lately. actually, for a long time already. it's something that takes up half of my consciousness, most - no, all - of the time. if i allow myself to dwell in it, god knows what i'll come up with. and it's not even a creative preoccupation. it's just... well, crazy, sometimes. i get really, really drawn to and into what might be called tiny cracks into the past. my past. distant and recent past alike. i dream about it. i dream myself into it. it makes me dizzy sometimes. and it occurs anywhere and anytime it wants to. i had an episode last tuesday in tacloban. was in bo's coffee club with a friend, we were waiting for my brothers to pick us up, and next thing i knew i was stuck in it, in this little crack, and i couldn't breathe. my friend offered me a cigarette. after a puff, i had to go to the toilet to throw up, and splash water on my face.

but, back to jet lag. i kind of know what the feeling is, actually. it is, i think, similar to the affliction that always paralyzes me after a trip home. happens without fail. i arrive in manila, or wherever, and i am disoriented. i either go on like a manic patient for a whole day without sleep and then promptly pass out without warning, or else i sort of black out the minute i am off the plane, such that everything else i do after deplaning is a blur. one very simple, logical explanation for this is that i am never able to sleep on the night before i leave home. even back in college. even as far back as high school when my sister and i were still active in the dance company, and we would go on these tours and such. sleep was simply impossible, and i have long stopped trying to have some, or even a little of it the night before a scheduled trip. so, i take the trip the next day and after that the hours, days, months, years meld into each other and i just float. on rare occasions, i allow myself to sink.

still another explanation is that i leave a huge part of me at home i every time i leave it. and it takes an equally huge effort to recover.

i sometimes think i have been grieving for a loooong time, even way before the deaths happened.

i won! i won!

2007-04-08T01:05:00.000-07:00

in a race against my other selves.

so, last night's wine and beer with Ch, Ad, J(b), R, J(g), and A was actually a celebration of a feat only i knew about.

saya lang.

***

and god, am i relieved the holy week is over! another feat there.

***

someday, when i grow up, i am going to write about "what i learned" from the workshop. and it will break hearts, mine being the first one.

checking papers in the wilder east

2007-03-17T22:57:00.000-07:00

last night i met a burmese guy in his mid-fifties who looks like noriega, is called noriega (but later revealed that his other name is frank, but that he'll have to kill me now that he told me his name), and who owns a way cool bar called noriega. but the bar is free of the stuff the original noriega is notorious for. it is located near the patpong district, but noriega the man was able to turn noriega the bar into the kind of place where it is perfectly normal and safe for a woman to sit at the bar alone, and enjoy her drink without being picked up or being suspected of wanting to be picked up. but then again, with all the heavenly bodies just within one's reach, who would be interested in normal people? but it's totally cool that there is such a place as noriega's for tourists who just want a quiet drink. i never got to try it though - having a quiet drink alone - because i was with a mixed-race, mixed-gender, mixed-profession, 80's music-loving, chain-smoking bunch of thirty-somethings.

we also went to a place called cheap charlie's, where it was really cheap, but the man tending the bar was not named charlie. bad trip. apart from selling really cheaply-priced drinks, cheap charlie's is also famous for its location: right in the middle of a street, atop a thin curve of uneven concrete. and there is a sign which says: attention, do not step back, keep off the street when a car passes. or something like that. kakatuwa.

i can't wait to be back here with husband weng, and with bayaw friends (kung matutuloy sila) next month.

okay. back to checking.

Tagged by Joel

2007-03-08T01:22:00.000-08:00

1. One book that changed your life. Thornton Wilder's Theophilus North which I read some fifteen years ago, and probably did not fully understand, but which also probably ruined me for life. It's an older, wittier, sadder, funnier, more tense (because older) Catcher in the Rye kind of story. I recently rediscovered the beloved old copy in our Tacloban home when I was there for the holidays. The book is as old I am. This year marks its 30th anniversary. And the character, Theophilus, is 30 years old.
2. One book you have read more than once. All the Nabokovs.
3. One book you would want on a desert island. Any thick paperback I can turn into edible pulp or sanitary wipe.
4. One book that made you laugh. My cousin's.
5. One book that made you cry. Lacan's Ecrits. Too difficult. Heartbreaking.
6. One book you wish had been written. Lacan in poetry.
7. One book you wish had never been written. Can't think of any.
8. One book you are currently reading. Children Playing Before The Statue of Hercules. An anthology of short stories edited by David Sedaris.
9. One book you have been meaning to read. Purgatorio.

I am tagging Dyndyn, Jet, Maryanne

sometimes it's nice to be away

2007-03-05T08:01:00.000-08:00

but it's always good to be back. = )

travel, for me, no matter how near or far, is always a surreal experience. it makes me dizzy thinking about time, and space, and shifts in the universe. and then when the language factor comes in, the experience gets even headier.

makes me sad how we have to speak the white man's language in order to communicate with our own neighbors.

makes me sadder how much of what we know about ourselves and our neighboring countries are based on hollywood images.

oh well.

there are days that don't count

2007-02-06T03:51:00.000-08:00

and there are days that do.

yesterday counts.

of all the days, it had to be yesterday when the taxi we (larry and i) were in had to conk out in the middle of a highway leading to a place totally unfamiliar to both of us. we were strangers in a strange town. but no one panicked. no one hyperventilated.

"ano'ng problema, manong?"
"di ko alam e"
"wala ba'ng gas, manong?"
"meron"
"makina?"
"hindi e"
"baterya?"
"ewan"
"Baka nga gas..."
"siguro"

and then manong got off his seat, walked over to the front, opened the hood, tinkered with the engine a bit, went back to his seat, turned the ignition, and the vehicle sputtered back to life. no explanations.

***

it was a day of wandering very cautiously, like timid out-of-towners, in a mall which could have been any other but the mall we (l and i) were supposed to be in. the concern was valid. between the two of us who forget our bags in places where we drink or smoke, mistaking one mall for another is highly probable.

***

it was a day of drinks, and catching up, reconnecting, relishing funny stories, expressing genuine concern over the not so funny ones, with very good friends (emmily and her husband, dan, and then with allan). lovely people all.

***

it was a day of following beer with more wine and some whiskey at home. and then of unabashed singing of songs we (larry, jet and i) unknowingly or secretly memorized. husband weng secretly laughing at us. we became even more immodest as the day wore on and the alcohol kicked. gospel, standards, cebuano kundiman, streisand broadway tunes, you name it. nothing was spared. even our goodbyes were sung.

****

yesterday was a day that counts.

all i know is that

2007-01-10T21:46:00.001-08:00

i can't write. not that i really have to. well, maybe i do. and maybe that's why i'm not doing it. if i do ever get to write, i will write about the following:

1. desaparecidos and time machines
2. headless bodies and explosive sex
3. trains and second-hand shops along aurora where country music is the only kind of music that gets played
4. spanish colonial land titles gathering dust in some obscure antique shop in kamuning
5. the history of jose mari chan songs
6. imelda swimming in the huge olympic size swimming pool right behind the sto. nino shrine facing the leyte national high school
7. more stories about floods and drowning and big, empty houses
8. me wringing the neck of the person who told me to write about it so i will feel better

***

i can't stop drinking. this, i really have to do. try to do. but, these days, i'm only happy when i'm drunk. truly. i will try to cut it down to three times a week.

***

i couldn't keep myself from laughing when students in an intensive english language class i'm handling asked me if i was filipino, because i looked either nepalese or mexican. russian, i said. oh, they said. are you serious, i said. yes, i am, one said. very good, i said. lesson in asking yes-no questions over, i added.

***

i can't imagine 2007. it scares me. too many important changes happening. too many important people gone.

***

i can't afford to let another term pass without having finished my thesis. i have been drilling myself too long on what it is i'm writing about. i don't make sense anymore.

the other list

2006-12-02T00:15:00.000-08:00

of things i need to do to keep me sane, should include this one:

Regulatory Architecture for Microfinance in Asia

and these:

> have wine in the afternooon (also in the evening, and late at night)
> ruminate on laughter and lacan (with larry, hehe... hmmm, too many L's there)
> have longer weekends
> dance
> sing
> hang out at antique collectors' shops
> take long walks along morato on early sunday mornings
> call home
> listen to my one year old nephew try to pronounce my name, mumble it, yell it over and over in different ways and manners as though with that one mispronounced name he is able to tell me his joys and woes at home
> print out my thesis and promptly forget about it
> watch ultra violent, heart-pounding action films with strong narratives and daniel craig in them

The list keeps getting longer.

2006-11-30T04:33:00.000-08:00

Apart from looking at Christmas lights and lanterns, hearing Christmas songs, and going to the Sacred Heart Church in Kamuning and the Mount Carmel church in New Manila, et.al., today I just discovered a few more on the virtual/mental list of “things I can no longer do because they terrify me, make my heart race, make me cry; make me feel paralyzed, suck the air out of my lungs”:

> Send packages through, or even set foot on, any LBC branch – because there is no longer any need to send meds by LBC every week, like I used to when she was on a break from radiation and therapy
> Ride the LRT2 alone –because everything about it- the smell of steel and plastic, the look on passengers’ faces – and everything it passes - the decrepit manila streets, misshapen houses, and impassive malls remain unchanged; because I rode it almost everyday for almost a year, and it always took me to the Leveriza station where I would get off and, from there, take a cab to the hosp, and be with her there where she was always mom and I was always child, even if I was mothering her most of the time. So precious and empowering were those moments that I ceased to mind rejoining the world the following day
> Listen to the song “Across the Universe” and most Beatles songs – because when it gets to the “nothing’s gonna change my world part” you know that the speaker is trying very hard to convince himself, but it’s all a dream, and it won’t last

mental note: there has got be a list of things i need to do to keep me sane.

2006-10-16T18:50:00.000-07:00

My sisters and I, at the hospital just hours before my mom passed away. Everyone was around to say good night. We were just preparing her for sleep.

My mom, on our last family vacation in Mactan.

thanks to everyone

2006-10-13T19:10:00.000-07:00

who condoled with us; visited, lingered, stayed up late; sent flowers, sympathies, prayers; offered masses, food, cash; shared stories, laughter, poetry and songs.

deeply, deeply appreciated.

how quickly the world shifts

2006-09-06T22:25:00.000-07:00

i wonder where all my happy projections disappeared to?

just happy to note that

2006-08-21T19:02:00.000-07:00

1. thesis is moving on, i'm finishing three chapters before the month ends (woohoo! sorry na lang sa mga nacriticize. what can i do? i have to sound like a real cl major)
2. classes are going well, i'm putting together midterm grades, recording scores diligently (is the pagpapanggap becoming real? omigadz!)
3. i saw jamie foxx's behind! (in miami vice. galeng! ng movie, i mean)
4. my sister's coming home! and with her baby, too! (and we'll go shopping and drinking and swimming and dancing and talking, talking, talking. i'm also anticipating little fights once in a while. )
5. the whole family will be here again! (i'm moving my desk and a whole shelf of books to our shoes and smoking area, to make way for unfurled sofa beds. not very happy about this bit. pero sige na la...)
6. the whole family will be in tacloban, barugo, and possibly cebu again! ( i can just imagine the chaos)
6. i think i can finish another story next week (pero over na, i won't force it)
7. i think i can actually finish 2 bottle s of 13.5% proof wine and still attend classes the next day (although i don't really have to)
8. there are only 6 weeks to go before vacation!!! husband weng and i are going home to tacloban, and will spend weeks at the beach!!! (i'm planning to read a minimum of ten non-theory books while at it)
9. there are only 6 weeks to go before my big three-oh! (i've always loved this age. been looking forward to it for thirty years)
10. i'm sure there are other happy things to note, i just can't think of anything any more right now. hard enough coming up with a list of ten. =)

oops, i did it again!

2006-07-31T07:42:00.000-07:00

i woke up early today. reread my CL reading assignment. prepared a sort of lesson plan for the week. came up with a fun, creative seatwork for the students. left the house 2 and a half hours before class time. noticed the unusually light traffic. congratulated myself, felt rewarded for being early to school. whistled an otis redding tune while walking to the dela costa building. said good morning to the guards. and then saw that the department office was locked, that the entire building was empty and rather dark. finally noticed that the whole campus was, in fact, eerily quiet, and bare, somehow. how very, very stupid of me! of course, classes were suspended for the day! i don't remember why though, i just vaguely recall receiving an email from the chair weeks ago. saint someone's day, or something. i should reacquaint myself with the saints one of these days, so i'll know all the holy holidays. haaaay. i can't count any more how many times something like this has happened to me. just weeks ago, during the bagyo, while rushing to make it to class on time, i totally missed, or stupidly dismissed, the big, bold signs saying classes suspended on all levels. and they were positioned right in front of all the three gates i had to pass on my way to the dela costa building. it's not that i love my classes too much to the point that"no classes" signs don't register in my head any more. i love my classes, but not that much, and not all of them. and it's not that i hate surprise class suspensions. i pray for them, fervently, every day before i open my eyes to the world. it is that, every time i make a resolve to change my ways, be more organized, act less on instinct and more on foresight, something like this happens, and the world grants me and my illogic a reason to slide back. excuses, excuses... but it's frustrating, really. i should treat work the way i do drinking, just do it whenever i want and whenever i can. just kidding. i need to be renewed for next sem. can't afford to be on an unpaid leave again.

pero sana no classes again tomorrow.

a story of mine got published pala

2006-06-24T19:25:00.000-07:00

in the free press, two weeks ago. but you wouldn't be able to make sense of it. major misprint in the middle. the editor apologized naman for not being available to supervise the printing as he usually does. still, i feel sad about the whole thing because this is one of my most playful pieces, i was trying to arrive at some meaning there (ahem), and i was very happy it got accepted for publication, until i saw just how confusing and meaningless it was on print. oh well. at least i'll get something for it, enough for a round of drinks i guess.

just some notes on a damp sunday morning

2006-06-24T18:31:00.000-07:00

1. was up early today. went down for coffee, and to make muni muni at the back of the house. was cool and foggy outside. very quiet. soft gray. you wouldn't think the house is literally just a stone's throw away from tomas morato. i have forgotten how much i love waking up early on a sunday morning, when the entire household (the entire city!) is still in deep sleep, when even the dogs are quiet, seemingly aware of the sundayness of it all, not demanding feed until at least ten o' clock. i just recently discovered this beauty. used to hate sundays with a passion. would feel my stomach twisting in all the wrong places every time i wake up on sundays. when jet, ruby and i were sharing an apartment in teachers' village, we would try to come up with different remedies for our sunday blues. we would drink on sunday afternoons, or evenings, and feel bad the following day anyway. we would have emma and other friends over for lunch, and also feel bad anyway, when they all start to leave to prepare for their mondays. we even tried attending sunday services at claret! and you can guess how we felt after that, anyway. weng and i used to go to the movies or just go malling on sundays, until it also felt a bit trite, having to line up behind bubbly, overextended families. and then, since the summer, with the whole family in town, with the obligatory lunches with our own extended families, sundays became just so hectic and exhausting, i started waking up before everyone else did to steal some sunday quiet for myself. it's wonderful witnessing the household slowly come to life. by the end of the day, i don't feel that much cheated anymore.

2. last wekend, we all trooped to cebu for a cousin's wedding (it was beautiful, a garden wedding by the sea). and while there, at the beach, work just completely deserted my mind. funny how easily one acclimates. although i had gone back to work as early as first week of june, somehow, i only, really felt the weight of it all this week, after the cebu vacation. a bit abrupt, actually. and now i actually miss the chaos and boisterousness of my own, big extended, very noisy family.

3. but i love this silence, too.

4. it's also nice watching world cup replays very early in the morning. i feel sad for japan, south korea and saudi arabia. feel na feel ko pa naman my asian roots during the world cup. now that they're out, i am nurturing my postcolonial connections with our latin american and african brothers. down with the imperialists!

5. happy ako for australia and italy, actually. even for poland, which left the world cup with some kind of a bang.

6. and now, my personal sunday ends.

is the summer over?

2006-05-21T10:40:00.000-07:00

for the first time in many, many nights, we are sleeping with the windows open. there is actually a steady, light, but fresh and cool breeze coming in through the window tonight. it's actually quite pleasant. but for all the whining and complaining i have been doing about the unbearable summer heat, this cool night makes me want to cry. don't worry bayaw, i won't. hehe.

other inveitable summer-end signs?

i have started receiving emails and text messages from people at the department, informing me of my oficial class loads, schedules, etc.. how i'd like to ignore the messages for a longer while. but
i know i have to get out of this funk soon, and start putting together my reading lists for my own good.

i have slowly gone back to joining friends for drinks, to make the most of my last couple of vacation days. this compulsion is a bit strange to me. i have noticed that every day or night off i can get from caregiving (which is what i have been doing on a full time basis, this summer) i feel i have to spend getting drunk, or hoarse from singing and laughing and talking, talking, talking. the days-after are weirder. i regret and feel bad often for the noise i made the night before, and spend the whole day irritated, and frustrated that i cannot escape hearing my own voice. kung puede lang mag shaddup, or mag sign language na lang the whole day...

friends and family who are in the states or in europe are preparing to come home for their summer break.

i am getting more and more attracted to, and have started taking out from storage boxes my old, jackets, suits,wraps, boots.

husband weng is fervently, feverishly trying to finish his xbox games like there's no tomorrow.

and for all this, what i'm most worried about really is that i have nothing to show for my two-month summer "vacation". well, i did finish a short story (and did it in a rush, just so i can say i produced something this summer). but the more important writing i should have been doing, working on the last 25% of my thesis, i have practically abandoned. bad, daryll, bad. no more beer for you.

so sad summer's almost over. good thing there are a couple of things i can look forward to in june: cousins, sister, nieces and friends coming home. teaching fiction and feature writing. being forced to finish my thesis. getting to use the ateneo and UP libraries again. working with bayaw joel at the ateneo and miriam. purple haze opening in our neighborhood. welcoming back mookie girl from her own vacation in ny. receiving monthly salary. "art film" nights (haha!) and margaritas with ruby, jet and emma. ending hospital visits!

yea. ok na rin.

an early goodbye to summer then.

i heart u.p.

2006-05-19T23:37:00.000-07:00

was in UP yesterday to return an over-over-overdue book i owed the humanities library. was able to wangle a hundred-days discount (palugit!) quite easily, and so left the libe with more than enough change for a mug of capuccino at the choco kiss, and more than enough time to wander and walk under the canopy of raintree branches around the university oval semi-aimlessly. i keep forgetting how much pleasure i derive out of these little surprises. i even forget how much of these free pleasures i actually deserve. (huhuhu, bring out the violins!)

dear friends and fellow fans,

2006-05-14T00:29:00.000-07:00

check this out and pass it on : http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeslrlq/gamalinda/index.html