Time Is Always For The Wishing

We'd been planning to go to U.P. since we learned how make gimik together, but only consummated the desire yesterday.

It took Louie and Althea's birthday and sheer spontaneity (or as Althea mentioned, not planning) for it to happen.

We also celebrated Cherie's return from her Harry Potter gig from the U.S. We missed her for three weeks and thank god, Cherie came home safely, prettier and pinker than ever.

I felt so spent yesterday. Spent much money, time, energy, laughter, words and silence in exchange for genuine enjoyment.

By the way, the picture on the left was birthday girl, Althea's, idea. She wanted a Beatles on Abbey Road pose. Only we're walking towards the other direction and it was nighttime (so the sun won't come till about 8 hours later) and we're not on Abbey Road and we're definitely not the Beatles. It's my favorite picture, though, so far. I always thought that Beauty is a math movement.

Another Anne, another Canadian, not just any other poet

Phantom Limbs
Anne Michaels

'The face of the city changes more quickly, alas! than the mortal heart.'
—Charles Baudelaire
So much of the city
is our bodies. Places in us
old light still slants through to.
Places that no longer exist but are full of feeling,
like phantom limbs.
Even the city carries ruins in its heart.
Longs to be touched in places
only it remembers.

Through the yellow hooves
of the ginkgo, parchment light;
in that apartment where I first
touched your shoulders under your sweater,
that October afternoon you left keys
in the fridge, milk on the table.
The yard--our moonlight motel--
where we slept summer's hottest nights,
on grass so cold it felt wet.
Behind us, freight trains crossed the city,
a steel banner, a noisy wall.
Now the hollow diad!
floats behind glass
in office towers also haunted
by our voices.

Few buildings, few lives
are built so well
even their ruins are beautiful.
But we loved the abandoned distillery:
stone floors cracking under empty vats,
wooden floors half rotted into dirt;
stairs leading nowhere; high rooms
run through with swords of dusty light.
A place the rain still loved, its silver paint
on rusted things that had stopped moving it seemed, for us.
Closed rooms open only to weather,
pungent with soot and molasses,
scent-stung. A place
where everything too big to take apart
had been left behind.

I've been quoting Anne Michaels for how many times already (as in here and here), yet I haven't posted a complete poem of hers. This is her due space.

A Certain Strength, Some Certainty

PISCES: "Belief is the end of intelligence," says philosopher Robert Anton Wilson. The moment you become attached to an opinion or theory, no matter how good or true or beautiful it might seem, you're no longer fully open to the mysteries that life brings you. Your perceptiveness wanes and your understanding shrinks. This is always important to keep in mind, of course, but especially so this week. A wave of raw truth is headed your way, and yet you will miss it completely unless you take a vacation from your beliefs about the way the world works.--Rob Brezsny

They say as you grow older, your stands become firmer. I am afraid of that time.

Some say we always change our minds, but not the fact that we are right.

If there is something I'd like to be proven wrong about, that is the death of the ideal. While I see, and by stream of logic figure, that something is incessantly building then gets destroyed, I wait still for that one wholeness that sustains and not merely survives.

If I fantasize, it is both because I understand something's distance from reality and I am creating a blueprint of something that is palpable in time.

A Report On Today's Weather

1. How do you tell someone you want to eat alone, be alone sometimes, if not most of the time?
2. That question, that anyaya, is really a courtesy invitation anyway.
3. What if they really like your company? It's not that you don't enjoy or appreciate theirs, you simply prefer being solitary.

4. September may well be my month. I may well be like a pomegranate blistering at its core. Hahaha.

5. You're pulled in so many ways, truly. Or that different parts of your body go toward their own desired directions.
6. How you never wanted to be common. Never the okay.
7. But all along fitting your self into those easy identifications--graduated from this university, works here, goes home to this city, does not smoke, drinks sometimes--to be easily identified, of course.

8. Suddenly all food at Mini Stop taste great.

Ghost Hunter, Human Fighter

This Dance of Distance

Looking for the ghost in your closet makes it go away.

Although it's more on facing your fear, it's not that simple right now--these fears and phantoms.

That lesson on why we should remain distant from each other: when too close, we break each other's myths of each other.

¤

A Lead Role In A Cage

WISH YOU WERE HERE
Pink Floyd

So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell,
Blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?

And did they get you to trade
Your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange
A walk on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?

How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We're just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl,
Year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found? The same old fears,
Wish you were here.

That lesson in categorization: "we stereotype people so as to make them manageable to us." And that is not entirely bad, for it is not necessary for us to delve into each other. It is a means of knowing how to treat someone for the immediate now.

There is this person, in the file cabinet of his mind, he seems to place every thing in "unfiled."

Oh how we manage

This day marks the second anniversary of this little online journal.

What I've figured? That despite my efforts in going against it, this—just like any other blog—is no more than a mere chronicling of angsts and quirks.

Focus In Digression

I finally visited my friend's cafe along Xavierville, Katipunan yesterday. It was one of those rare times when I had gone too far commuting. Quezon City's altogether another planet for me.


First the joyride

It was my first time to ride the LRT2 and shallow as it may sound, I was thrilled. The Katipunan station was like a subway. What a train and train ride. I could only hope the LRT from Baclaran to Monumento would be as neat and big and helpful. LRT2's one of those functional places that helps you help your self. It treats you as the intelligent human being that you are.


The hunger from a long journey filled by one of those necessary verses

Asking the Kitchen

for work is like bartering with any
lover: cut and be cut; warm
to be warm. Whisper, toil; tables will
breathe, fill, sharpening the palate,
your style.

--Cindra Halm

Then the lunch

There were so many things going on in my head while I was having lunch with my friends.

1. There are so many nice clothes, accessories, gadgets and furniture I want to buy, but can't.
2. This friend of mine, who owns the cafe, is not that close to me. Yet she is the one who constantly keeps in touch. Yet she is the one who has every effort and concern to find out how am I doing, telling me my company is missed.
3. So many filthy things around. Not that I lose my idealism, my romanticism, but given this garden of bullshit for a social world, I'd take evil anytime over ignorance. More on that thought soon.
4. Who's this person who said "only permanence change?"
5. There's a surplus of food at home. Too many food at home and I'm afraid there'll be 30 days and nights of drought.
6. The pesto's very good and cheap, but when will this lunch be finished?

Back in those times, it was all about philosophers having coffee at Starbucks discussing how many angels could fit in a needle's eye

1

When Starbucks opened along Taft Avenue near La Salle, I never imagined myself going there, but not because I didn't like the place. I think I was a sophomore when it opened (shit, the time should be clear in my memory as it wasn't so long ago). First, I knew I didn't have enough money to have a snack there—well that's the first and only reason.

I eventually learned to go there—eventually habitually—when I started hanging out with new friends from Malate.

My allowance then was P100 a day (or P150?—stupid memory!) Because I was the one doing it, I wasn't surprised with myself. My parents, on the other hand, were baffled. I'd be out all night and when they thought I had already gone to Tagaytay or Baguio, they'd find out I was just there at Starbucks—there for about half a day. And they'd ask, How do you manage to hang out at Starbucks, where do you get the money? I didn't know exactly.

My staple Starbucks snack consisted of maple oat scone and coffee frap. This I know clearly: the maple oat scone was just 40 pesos. The coffee frap was around 80 p—I'm certain it didn't go over a hundred pesos.

There was a term when I had Saturday classes from 8am to 12 noon. After class, I'd immediately go home, but I'd stop by Starbucks first to get food and then eat it on the bus.

Those bus rides were some of the best moments of my life: noontime—I just attended something meaningful in the morning and there was still the rest of the day to complete, to look forward to—I was alone with food I enjoyed, seated yet moving still.

2

'The broken hearts club' (indirect quote):

We try to know another and we have coffee with them and talk and eventually have sex with them if we like them, but we can also have sex first and see if we like to eventually take this person out for coffee and talk.

Anne Carson, 'Autobiography of Red':

Sex is a way of getting to know someone.

3
'...My hands are better.'
—Amanda Paige (context: sex)
(I'm having neither sex nor long hours of 'coffee and conversation' with someone, in the meantime. In this world of fiction, meantime stretches to years.)

Whenever I hear about people who cannot eat alone, I become perplexed.

Maybe I was too young when I learned solitude's magnificence. Not that I didn't have friends. In fact I kept telling stories on how easy it was for me to make friends when I was in grade school. I barely had to try.

I gained from Althea (or to construe her statement) that perhaps a person couldn't take being alone because he couldn't take the company that is himself, he couldn't take the conversationalist that is him.

4

There are no more maple oat scones. I've asked Starbucks again and again about it and it's funny, because I actually thought my obstinacy would bring it back. But, hey, Starbucks, if you, by some chance, is reading this, please bring back the maple oat scone.

5

There are fewer and fewer people who have the time to stop. Everyone has to go and do and get something fast.

Nothing in particular

If I could marry this weather. I can't stress it enough; too bad I don't know how to write it.

Amazingly, though, it's not the cold that has made me want to snuggle in bed, but the temperature that has pushed me to work. I've accomplished so many things today and I'm not talking about a mere sense of having done something, but a heightening of your sense of self.

Therefore this night tonight....can never be a subject of this specific conversation.
—Pattiann Rogers, 'In General'

And then the time to snuggle in bed.

I Know Now How It Feels When The Dead Lives

The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or of joy. The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.*

By accident--call it adverse serendipity--I read my name in one of the journals of an old friend. The anecdote involving me was appended as a footnote on a more recent entry.

That friendship had been one of those that bursted with so much color and delight, that then gave in to fading. That you couldn't figure why and you tried reviving the liveliness only to end up with disappointment. And you know now nothing about it will be the same. You know now there's no more chance of making it any better.

Reading my name, I shivered, imagining the distance not just of time, but of emotions and the way we see each other. I was there, under heap of new friends, circumstances, extremely radiant joys and darker tragedies. That act of him remembering me, what I used to be, even for a mere moment, what we used to be, what was then--what was then doesn't exist now. Memory's a completely new planet.

I want to believe now that most good friendships are meant for the breaking. And that is not a fact to be sad about. I want to believe these are people that make your story move forward--sure they are a part of you, but you must not cling onto them. They have their own stories to continue.

And thus till now the theory remains relevant, what this world requires of us is just attention. The best laughs I've had are with that person. He did his part: he made me feel like I had something important to say, that I had a funny a joke; he introduced me to Anne Carson and David Mack.

The force of the written word. Seeing my name inscribed, bringing to mind all that sign carries with it. Conscious of how he was seeing it. And now this feeling of needing the proper expletive to express (or in truth, to hide) this strange furious sensation of knowing what was then doesn't exist anymore, but can't find it.


_________________________
* Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams. In a chapter where the texture of time in this particular world "happens to be sticky.... Individual people become stuck in some point of their lives and do not get free."

'Saktong-sakto

Rolando Tinio
AKALA KO

Akala ko, para nang piyanong
Nasusian ang iyong kalooban
At naihagis ang susi kung saan,
Hindi na matitipa ng sino at alinman
Ang mga tekladong tuklap, naninilaw.

Dahil dumating ka isang gabi:
Naupo sa may pintuan,
Tahimik na naninimbang
Sa mga bagong pangyayaring
Nagaganap sa iyong harapan.

Sa manaka-nakang sindi ng mata mo,
Parang puno sa lihim ang dibdib mong
Ayaw siyempreng ipaglantaran
Sa mga nakilala noon lamang.

Hanggang ngayon (linggo na ang nakaraan),
Nakabalabal ka pa ng sariling panginorin,
Lumulutang sa sarili mong ulap,
Parang kakahuyang pinid ang sanga at dahon
Nang huwag mapasok ng liwanag
Buhat sa kung-anong daigdig o pintuan
Na hindi mo kilala at ayaw pang subukan.

Para sa akin ang líriká na ito.

Hildegarde Flanner

MOON AND MOTOR

The glide of moon along my fenders flowing
Is like a motion milking upon light,
So rapt and pallid does it lap and draw
From silver sources crescent with the night.
The earth is pouring off her liquid miles
Whose waterless water is the way I feel
Coursing on the desert, every sense
Collected and yet fluid at the wheel,
While cylinder and floating cylinder
So perfectly receive the plunge of power
That night, and rumors of capricious night,
Time’s own, the frictionless anointed hour
Wait on the motor mystical that drives,
Lean to the fury lovely and repose
That are the piston’s plunder and the sum
Of tranquil labor that an engine knows.


¤


POEM

At least and still at lingering last we can
Console ourselves because this earth is ours,
Though we could never hurl the hurricane,
Nor weld a hill, nor soft unlock the showers,
Nor rivet the diamond under the abyss,
Nor add the desert up, nor crumble the frost
Over the flower’s face. Remembering this
The warm security of pride is lost,
For we are dull mismasters of a huge event
And cannot think who tutored us to fail,
We ruin so quick, and hope is nearly spent;
But faint at intervals, benign and frail
A courage whispers, just this side of fate,
Cling earthward, inward, do not abdicate!

The Third Who Lay In Our Embrace

Woman to Man
Judith Wright

The eyeless labourer in the night,
the selfless, shapeless seed I hold,
builds for its resurrection day --
silent and swift and deep from sight
foresees the unimagined light.

This is no child with a child's face;
this has no name to name it by:
yet you and I have known it well.
This is our hunter and our chase,
the third who lay in our embrace.

This is the strength that your arm knows,
the arc of flesh that is my breast,
the precise crystals of our eyes.
This is the blood's wild tree that grows
the intricate and folded rose.

This is the maker and the made;
this is the question and reply;
the blind head butting at the dark,
the blaze of light upon the blade.
Oh hold me, for I am afraid.

Dearest Marie, this is for you. I hope you read it well. I wish you well.

A Silence Precise

In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.--Eric Hoffer

When I say, kumusta?, I do not mean it as a greeting, acknowledging your presence, informing you of mine.

When I say, kumusta?, I stop and wait for an answer. I have decided to make a fragment of your life my concern. I will not ask if I do not care, even if I know you.

Thus trust is never about another. Trust is always a trust in your self, that no matter how the world will respond to your behavior, you know in your gut that you are prepared to regard it.

The Fullunabridgedverbatim Transcript Of My Conversation With Neil Gaiman

ME: Thank you very much.
NEIL GAIMAN: You're very welcome.

Good job, girl. Good job.

Tekkie Me

I am not one to believe the best things are for free. But I'd take what's free any time.

It was in my senior year in high school when cellular phones became so fashionably necessary, and in the blink of an eye, the cell phone had been as ordinary as a pen and a hanky. Everyone had them. I didn't have one then. Until my sophomore year in college. I had my first authentic gimik. I hung out with new-found friends at the Remedios Circle in Malate till 4 AM. Going home, I expected a full hour or two of reprimand from my parents, but I received the silent treatment instead. The next night, I became the new owner of a Nokia 3210.

I'm not crazy about cell phones. Nokia features such as games are wasted on me. My average text messages sent per day is roughly 1. I have never—ever!—consumed my P300 load in two months. I hardly make calls. If I need to call someone, I look for the nearest pay phone. For 5 years, my Nokia 3210 has stayed with me—till its backlight's dysfunctional, till it can already be considered vintage, Jurassic. I would still hold on to it, if not for my Ate.

From out of the blue, she gave me a very old model of a Handspring Treo. The display's still in black and white, but it doesn't matter; a part of me can endure without color. It's a nice toy and it's once again for free. I appreciate it because it functions as a palmtop and cell phone and you can access the internet through it.

With this new gadget comes one of my most favorite activities in the world: organizing, personalizing.

My phone book's a bit of a revelation, there's so much space. My date book's no surprise, there are no dates. The only game I enjoy from the 5 games available is Hardball (which is really a version of Arkanoid, which reminds me of yesteryears with Nintendo).

Now this is the part where I'm supposed to be wrapping up this entry and express some sort of epiphany. There is none. I don't know. Call me. Gift me with a laptop.

The Other Side Of Surrender1

What sustains. I was cleaning my room a couple of weeks ago.

It is impossible to clean an entire room. It must be impossible to clean an entire life. First the furniture. Then the drawers. Then sorting. It takes half a day to sort, but it is especially difficult for those, like me, who finds it hard to throw away things.

I was looking at 3 long rows of encoded, photocopied and printed out materials from prose, poetry, criticism to pinoyexchange threads. What I used to laugh at before weren't funny any more. A turn of phrase that astonished me once had grown stale.

But those which aged with me:

the moon not less in its halfness²

you seemed a sort of mirage, until I drank you³

Cringe-worthy as it may sound, I'm drowning in a sea of me. With all this continual cleaning, I later on incurred negative intoxication (my personal poetic term for cough and cold.) So much dust from the past!

My friend, Morx, told me that if ever his book collection caught fire, he would want every pulp gone, because if there was a piece left, there'd be something tangible to remind you of the loss.

Being the selfish materialistic person that I am, I would like to be burned as well. But then again I never get too far in proving that I am as selfish and materialistic as I think.

what you have is not yours, what you give is yours⁴

Notes:
1. David Deida: 'Give yourself to love itself, without a shred of you remaining. Die completely into loving. When you return, when your sense of self is recollected, you will be refreshed through and through, washed awake by the innocence lying wide on the other side of surrender.'
2. Anne Michaels
3. Paul Monette
4. Committed (the comic strip)

Better Articulation Of Things Learned Earlier

Jamie James (22):

We shall never know exactly to what extent the historical Pythagoras corresponds to the Master of humanist tradition, any more than we shall ever know who actually wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, or whether all those spiritual utterances in the Gospels were really said by the historical Jesus of Nazareth. Yet the doubts themselves are anachronistic: the point is that through the vast span of history in which Pythagorean humanism (and the study of Homer, and Christianity) were vibrant intellectual forces, there was never a shadow of doubt as to the authenticity and veracity of the tradition. You can put quotation marks around "Pythagoras" if that will make you feel more up-to-date, but it will not alter the meaning; the people who pursued Pythagoreanism over the course of thousands of years did believe, implicitly, in the historicity of the Master. The real Jesus may have been a charlatan, but the Jesus worshipped by millions of people changed the course of history; and it would be wrong, regardless of what a thousand copiously annotated doctoral dissertations may say, to attribute the Iliad to Anonymous.

James (18):

In this century the classics have slipped to the periphery of the curriculum, and in the place of enquiring humanism we now have condescending nihilism: the modern intelligentsia smiles at Christian fundamentalists, at credulous followers of absurd schools of psychotherapy, at adherents of what is called the New Age. Yet if people are driven to feel a connection with the Absolute by wearing crystal jewelry and listening to voice from beyond grave, as naïve as those beliefs may be perhaps we ought not castigate them for abandoning science--for has not science abandoned them? Is it reasonable to expect that the man in the street will be content with being told, "Your life is pointless, and you are destined to be a sterile, meaningless speck of stardust, but be of good cheer: science will tell you how to power your automobile with pig droppings"?

_________________________
James, Jamie. The Music of the Spheres. New York: Copernicus, 1993.

Undergraduate, Not Student

Marianne Moore:

THE STUDENT

"In America," began
the lecturer, "everyone must have a
degree. The French do not think that
all can have it, they don't say everyone
     must go to college." We
incline to feel
     that although it may be unnecessary

to know fifteen languages,
one degree is not too much. With us, a
school--like the singing tree of which
the leaves were mouths singing in concert--
     is both a tree of knowledge
and of liberty--
     seen in the unanimity of college

mottoes, Lux et veritas,
Christo et ecclesiae, Sapient
felici. It may be that we
have not knowledge, just opinions, that we
     are undergraduates,
not students; we know
     we have been told with smiles, by expatriates

of whom we had asked "When will
your experiment be finished?" "Science
is never finished." Secluded
from domestic strife, Jack Bookworm led a
     college life, says Goldsmith;
and here also as
     in France or Oxford, study is beset with
dangers,--with bookworms, mildews,
and complaisancies. But someone in New
England has known enough to say
the student is patience personified,
     is a variety
of hero, "patient
of neglect and of reproach"--who can "hold by

himself." You can't beat hens to
make them lay. Wolf's wool is the best of wool,
but it cannot be sheared because
the wolf will not comply. With knowledge as
     with the wolf's surliness,
the student studies
     voluntarily, refusing to be less

than individual. He
"gives his opinion and then rests on it";
he renders service when there is
no reward, and is too reclusive for
     some things to seem to touch
him, not because he
     has no feeling but because he has so much.

Now I've got to find the perfect teacher poem.

Honesty: From Fact To Feeling

"It's the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have time."

- Tallulah Bankhead

Though my family would write Roman Catholic in our documents, we didn't practice going to church every Sunday. My parents didn't teach us to pray and fear God.

In grade 4, I transferred from a public school to a private Catholic school. My new school held mandatory confession every first Friday of the month (usually after the first Friday mass.) Our teachers instructed us to write down our sins so that we won't forget them and so as to make the process fast.

I was sort of excited with confessing, as it would be my first time. I simply saw it then as another new concept to learn.

But as I got used to doing it, listing sins became just another task. There were times when I could only think of lying and being lazy to do homework as my only wrongdoings for the month. I would then invent sins as I thought it couldn't be possible for a human being to commit only 2 offenses against God in a span of 4 weeks. I was afraid the priest might perceive me lying.