How "sincere" is a private notebook? how "true" is a confession? how "historical" is a memory?

Filipino playwright and director Anton Juan was in town a couple of weeks ago. Currently a tenured professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, he spent a weekend in Oakland, visiting our friends Manny and Dang Canteras. The internationally renowned artist (knighted twice in France, conferred a presidential honor in Greece, elevated to the Hall of Fame in the Philippines) wowed us with his pancetta carbonara. He talked about the tough decisions involved in moving to America, as well as scheduled trips back home to pursue ongoing projects in the islands. He deplored the Philippine government's neglect of local artists, the pitiful circumstances his contemporaries had to deal with. We talked about giving or not giving up rights to have our award-winning works made available online. He offered thoughts on a story I'm working on about a town mayor, a town idiot, and a filmmaker. He suggested I write a play about it and center on the conflicting voices of storytellers and the elusiveness of truth. I took his photos:



Last month, I read a volume of Coleridge' transcendent biography, authored by Holmes. Below are some of the passages that struck me:

How "sincere" is a private Notebook? how "true" is a confession? how "historical" is a memory? One thing is certain: Coleridge dramatised himself in his most solitary moments (as we all, on reflection, do); and his Notebooks can never be accepted as the last word on anything (least of all as the last word from Coleridge). Coleridge was a man who could confess spiritual despair at midday; and dine out brilliantly at midnight.

During this period Coleridge must have been producing something like fifty lines of blank verse a day, and a tremendous sense of liberation came over him. From the mundane problems of "bread and cheese", his eyes lifted to the hills of the Quantocks and his imagination soared towards immortal works. It was at this time that he produced a celebrated description of how a modern Epic poem should be produced, with massive preparatory labours worth of some intellectual Hercules. The subject had perhaps arisen in conversation with Wordsworth. There is a perceptible undertone of self-parody so characteristic of Coleridge, since it was a definition given to his publisher Cottle who had been waiting so patiently, week after week, for the poet to finish his proof corrections.

Observe the march of Milton - his severe application, his laborious polish, his deep metaphysical researches, his prayers to God before he began his great poem, all that could lift and swell his intellect, became his daily food. I should not think of devoting less than 20 years to an Epic Poem. Ten to collect materials and warm my mind with universal science. I would be a tolerable Mathematician, I would thoroughly know Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Optics, and Astronomy, Botany, Mettalurgy, Fossilism, Chemistry, Geology, Anatomy, Medicine -- then the mind of man -- then the minds of men in all Travels, Voyages and Histories. So I would spend ten years -- the next five to the composition of the poem -- and the five last to the correction of it. So I would write not unhappily hearing of that divine and rightly-whispering Voice, which speaks to mighty minds of predestined Garlands, starry and unwithering. - Coleridge

In the sudden release of unconscious images, which Coleridge credited to his opium "reverie", the poet becomes both the controlling magus of this power, and also perhaps its sacrificial victim.

The haunting almost proverbial, Romantic folk-myth which the poem seems to embody, takes much of its memorable force from the uncertainty about the poet's own fate. Does the power finally anoint him as an emperor of the Imagination, or destroy him as its slave and sacrifice?

What Wordsworth could not have known was how long Coleridge had been unconsciouly gathering the incidents and images for the poem in his own life, from earliest childhood. The ballads heard in his nurse's arms; the sea-bird shot by Philip Quarll; the moving sun and moon on the Ottery church clock; the "grinning" thirst experienced on his Welsh undergraduate tour; the hallucination of the dragoon in the Henley Pest House and the seizures at Bristol; the idea of the spiritual sea-voyage in his cottage at Stowey; and even the lawys of hospitality protecting the little mice: all found their place magically in the ballad. No one could have given him those.



As a biographer I have tried to show how deeply and instinctively the image of the lonely sea-voyage runs through all Coleridge's thought, which is curious when one considers that his only maritime experience up to 1798 was his crossing on the Chepstow ferry... The whole idea of a writer's life as perilous, solitary, oceanic expedition passes powerfully into nineteenth-century poetry -- in Shelley, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, for example. It still affects our responses to such modern works as the novels of William Golding, the accounts of solo circumnavigations by Sir Francis Chichester (and many others) and such a maverick, masterpiece as The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, by Nicholas Tomalin, 1970. As a Romantic legend -- for that is what it has become -- the Ancient Mariner would make a superb opera, or even a modern ballet, as Michael Bogdanov's stage-experiments have shown.

Hazzlit seemed to associate Coleridge with many of the political and emotional disappointments he had experienced in his own adult life, and he attacked the older man with a personal vindictiveness that suggests he was unconsciously attacking something in himself. This gives all his writing on Coleridge -- but most notably in The Spirit of the Age (1825) - a brilliant surface of satire, with a deep undernote of passionate elegy. It is a tone that a biographer might aspire to.

Regarding Sid

The last email I received from Sid Gomez Hildawa was dated December 25, 2007, his birthday. “Dear Willi,” he wrote, “I’m here in Israel for my 45th birthday. I’m including your intentions when I visit Bethlehem this Christmas day…” Sid, a Filipino architect and a prizewinning artist and poet, was in the Middle East to help install “Open Doors”, the first Philippine monument in Israel. The installation commemorates the Filipinos’ hospitality and courage when the islands made available ten thousand visas to Jewish refugees fleeing Europe during the Holocaust. Made of metal and Philippine marble, it features footprints of some of the refugees.

(Above, Sid in the middle, in Israel)

And so it came as a shock when a friend emailed me today that Sid passed away last night. Like everybody else, I kept hoping that it was just some horrible April Fools joke. But it was on the news on the Internet. Stunned friends shared online testimonies: Sid will be terribly missed. Apparently, Sid had not been feeling well. He was hospitalized in Manila, where last night his liver and spleen gave in and he succumbed to typhoid and dengue fever. It's still not clear where he contracted the virus. While at work in our new office in downtown San Francisco, I kept reading Sid’s last email. I was too shaken, I had to get off work early. How apt that Sid had emailed me in Israel, celebrating his last birthday with Christ, in the place where the Holy Family escaped to and the Messiah was born; and that he was there, as an architect and artist housing the memory of opening doors toward safe havens.

Sid and I first met in Manila in the early nineties, got acquainted in the beginning through a series of phone calls. I was then working at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP), part of the team that launched the First National Theater Festival. Sid, on the other hand, talked a lot about art and Cuba. (Too bad, I can’t remember the details. Ten years later, Sid presented an installation art for the 7th Havana Biennial in Cuba: upright cards with sketches of dream homes made by people who still live with their parents, all arranged in a grid on the gallery floor, a “suburb of frustrated dreams”, according to Art in America.) Nonetheless, we finally did meet and our first eyeball took place at the CCP cafeteria. It was summer and I was in my early twenties; Sid a few years older. That April day, we drove to the highlands of Antipolo, the pilgrimage capital of the Philippines, to visit a local artist. Later that day, we drove to a viewpoint where he took black and white photos of the hilly landscape. A few days later, we picked up the contact prints and from those, he had a few frames developed. He picked one image and gave it to me. So why this particular landscape of hills and clouds?

“See those low scattered clouds just above the horizon?” Sid asked me.

“Yeah?”

“Well there’s one big cloud and it’s not in the photo. We only know that it’s there - looming above - because of the enormous island of shadow it casts in the middle of the photo. I like the way how something that is not there can split the entire picture in half.”

If I wanted to, I suppose I could turn Sid’s words, turn it inside out, and search for meanings. But of course those weren’t his actual words (twenty years ago, come on!) But it’s close, quite close, at least closer to how I want those words to mean to me now. Ah, the shadows it casts. My other memory of Sid during those years was when he would come to visit me at night with drafts of his early poems. He was very eager to hear my advice: to sometimes end a line precariously with thoughts on a precipice, with cosmic hooks and suspended words. And then I left the country.

I moved to Thailand and we lost touch. It would take almost ten years before our paths would cross again in Bangkok during a workshop on Southeast Asian architecture. He gave me an old cassette tape with a dedication, “Thank you for the gift of words.” I, in turn, told him that I had just bought an old, medium format, twin lens Rolleiflex camera. He was thrilled to hear that I had taken up photography, how our interests in the literary and visual arts had flowed both ways. Later that night we went back to my apartment: he was particularly curious to see my portfolio of cross-processed prints. He even suggested that next time I return to the Philippines, maybe we could arrange a talk and show some of my works in his class. That never materialized. But in one of my homecoming visits, I was able to arrange a meeting between him and folk artists from my hometown. Sid was then managing CCP’s visual, literary and media arts department.

The last time I saw Sid was in 2005, the year I completed my term in Thailand. I went back to the Philippines and met him in his office. I told him I was moving to the United States. As a keepsake, he gave me a copy of his masteral dissertation, entitled “Regarding Space”. On a page was a passage mentioning me, and that veiled time many, many years ago when he showed me his early poems. I was happy for him and even happier the following year when, while traveling across America, I learned that Sid had won a national award for his poems. Not only that. In 2006, Sid also got accepted for a fall residency at the Vermont Studio Center. I had just missed him in the East Coast, where I had spent summer. I was already back in the Bay Area when we spoke on the phone. Our last conversation. We wondered if we could meet in New York before his flight back home. He gave the address and a number. But it was all tentative. I had been traveling from winter to summer and months of transience had taken its toll. Maybe next time.

Sid, sorry I didn't call you back. I did not even reply to your last Christmas email. Yes, I’ve covered a lot of miles and I’m just about ready for another leg; and yours, on the other hand, have ended with California poppies and buttercups dotting the hills here. But just to let you know, the personal intentions you prayed for me in Bethlehem were granted; and that there is one photo that has traveled with me for almost twenty years now, across hills, borders and seas - one image survived, rooting my transitions under your unseen cloud, your looming rainfall of suspended words.


(Antipolo, April 1990, photo taken by Sid Hildawa, 1962-2008)

I am so thrilled!

A year ago, I started Lagalag, the Traveling Journal of Filipinos Project, gathering forty Filipinos around the world, their images and stories, in a moleskine notebook. They have never met each other; they come from different walks of life, but they are all linked by one incredible journey, one that is homeward bound.

From Californiaa, my pictures and stories have traveled to different parts of the United States, to Canada, Japan, Pakistan, Qatar, Thailand, Cambodia, England, China, Hong Kong, all the way to the Philippines -- with more stories on how Filipinos see the world.

As we're nearing completion of the project and gearing up for the second leg of another journal, I learned today of Pinoy Biyahero: "Inspired by Willi Pascual’s Lagalag, Flickr Philippines Group invites you to a local journey: Welcome to Pinoy Biyahero (God Bless Our Trip) A Travelogue of Flickristas Around the Philippines."

That is soooo amazing! A year ago, I didn't know all these people. But through the project, I feel that I have not only redefined my boundaries of home; I have also come closer to a deeper understanding of what binds us together: the transformative power of storytelling, of encounters, of the world itself when we allow it to change us.

I hope that the Flickr Philippine Group will support Pinoy Biyahero. More power.

Below are some of the pages of Lagalag, The Traveling Journal of Filipinos Project.



A tattoed military man in Japan rescues a dying man inside a car.
A writer in Cambodia loses himself in a foreign land through a painful ritual.
A former recording artist discovers new wells of creativity in Canada.
A man in the gaming industry prowls the streets of Manila in search of lost messages.

They have never met each other but they are bound to share one amazing journey around the world. They are just four of the twenty Filipinos in Lagalag, sharing one thing in common – they all take pictures.

Twenty different ways on how Filiipinos see the world.
Twenty photos. Twenty stories.
One destination. Your doorstep.

Dadaan ba sa iyo ang biyaheng Pinoy?

LAGALAG: The Traveling Journal of Filipinos Project

Winston and Me

Us and Them: The Book and the Brotherhood

"No, go I must, they're calling
me."
"Who are they?"
Rising he said "Some
day you'll know. They're calling to you
too." Darkly he rose, and then I slept.

- Frank O'Hara, A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island


I.

In 2005, while speaking in public, Frank Cimatu, a prizewinning poet, journalist and longtime friend, made an observation about himself and me as writers. “We’re both outsiders,” he said. I was seated next to him during a talk we gave on writers and writing at the Central Luzon State University. I was caught off-guard, befuddled by his first-time public admission. He meant that even with our published works, fellowships and awards, we have remained on the borders if not outside the honored brotherhood of Manila’s literary circle. We’re not based in the Philippine capital, he explained; he is based up north and I am based abroad. It wasn’t arrogant posturing. It was, in fact, a candid acknowledgment of what we had hoped for in the beginning, what any aspiring writer desires, that is, to belong, to be one of them. Them.

I wanted to react but back then I wasn’t sure if much of what I had to say was going to make sense or be of relevance to our audience. Also, I was aware that our conversation was being recorded on video so I opted to keep my mouth shut. One thing is clear. Frank’s opinion stirred fraternal sentiments. He said “we”, so being an outsider didn’t feel as alienating as it sounded. Also, he knew me well enough as a writer and as a friend (twenty solid years earned), and so when he went on to say that I have “to leave, to be away from the subject, to be able to write about it,” he was fairly credible. He didn’t just mean the objectivity permitted by distance; he understood the necessity of time to ovulate, to locate and find connections, to distill. He saw first-hand how my literary output thrives on displacement and memory.

The poet Frank O’Hara was an outsider in his small New England hometown (it didn’t help that he was a repressed gay in the navy), and until he moved to New York, according to essayist Joan Acocella, and met like-minded souls, forged intense friendships with artists, he couldn’t become himself, his interesting self. Meeting Frank Cimatu in Baguio City in 1987 and discovering our passion for books had that impact on me. He was reading a lot of Vonnegut and Tom Robbins back then. I had just read Richard Rodriguez’ Hunger of Memory and was reading pretty much anything Mary Gordon wrote. We tested each other on the first and last lines of the books of Latin American authors. We shared one copy of Krip Yuson’s The Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café and read it while drinking Irish coffee at Café Amapola. I passed on to him my subscription copies of The New Yorker and Granta including books I checked out at the Camp John Hay library. He, on the other hand, knew where all the second-hand bookstores were. From Session Road to Camp Henry T. Allen, we spent hours scanning titles from towering stacks of used books. A habitué of these musty troves, he was a master at quickly spotting literary treasures from piles of potboilers. I dogged him and learned to catch that wolfish glint in his eye, zero in on Djuna Barnes or Muriel Spark, pull the book, and grin through his protests of you freak, I saw that first! We hoarded books and stole John Irvings from each other. In between we smoked, drank a lot and nursed our unrequited loves. We were in our early twenties. When I ran out of money and the time came for me to leave Baguio, Frank helped me drag a laundry sack filled with books along Session Road, back to the second-hand bookstores where they were sold again. The books were returned to their old shelves, but there was something greater in each dog-eared, underlined page that sprouted wings and flew back to us, where to this day it remains barred behind our melancholic ribcage, along with our throbbing definition of “us” and “them”.


II.

One early foggy morning in 1990, I gave Frank a surprise visit in Baguio. I showed up at their doorstep in New Lucban with a huge traveling bag. He had just woken up and was on his way out. His mother had asked him to buy bread for breakfast. I walked with him to the corner bakery store where he bought a bag of warm pan de sal.

“Come with me,” I said. “I’m going back to Chananao.”

(Next: meeting Iris Murdoch. To be continued...)

The Only Safe Thing

Notes from Anne Fadiman's At Large and At Small:

"His viewpoint was subjective, his frame of reference concrete, his style digressive, his eccentricities conspicuous, and his laughter usually at his own expense. And though he wrote about himself, he also wrote about a subject, something with which he was so familiar, and about which he was often so enthusiastic, that his words were suffused with a lover's intimacy...

"Today's readers encounter plenty of critical essays (more brain than heart) and plenty of personal -- very personal -- essays (more heart than brain), but not many familiar essays (equal measures of both)" - Anne Fadiman on the writer of the familiar essay

"Hell may be a dark place, but so is the womb." - AF on Night Owl


(from Love is the Devil, analog photo I shot inside Sala Chalermkreung Theater, Bangkok, Thailand.

"There is absolutely no such thing as reading by a candle... We have tried the affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens, and in sultry arbours; but it was labour thrown away. Those gay notes in the beam come about you, hovering and teasing, like so many coquets, that will have you all to their self, and are jealous of your abstractions. By the midnight taper, the writer digests his meditations. By the same light we must approach to their perusal, if we would catch the flame, the odour." - Charles Lamb

"Should the life of the writer affect our valuation of the work? In other words, if the writer was a stinker, do we boot the book out of the canon? Or, as The New York Times Magazine put it in an article about Herman Melville, "Forget the whale. The big question is did he beat his wife?"...

"But should we forget the whale? That is, if Melville did push Lizzie down the stairs, should the stock of Moby-Dick experience a parallel plummet? In similar fashion, we know that Byron committed incest and pedophilia, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were anti-Semites, and Philip Larkin was a more democratic sort of bigot (he hated almost everybody). Should their poetry be permanently tainted by their character deficiencies?" - Anne Fadiman, Procrustyes and the Culture Wars

"Could one say he was escaping from pain and self-loathing and the pain of self-loathing? Yet is seems to me that his escapism was extraordinary in that it was fueled (at least sometimes) by such a tremendous sense of what he is fleeing toward - feelings of transcendence, a state of oneness with the deity, a non-material reality finer than the gross corporeality of the body etc. etc. That's why there's always something reductive about those studies of S.T.C. that present him as, in effect, a typical junkie. Maybe, like every junkie, he just wanted to get high, but what got him high was of a higher order than with any other junkie one can think of." - critic EVELYN TOYNTON corresponding with essayist AF regarding Samuel Taylor Coleridge


(Jonathan, Monette and Iona. photo taken December 2007, Napa, CA)

"The only safe thing is to take a chance." - Elaine May

Memorial

Ken Molver, 90, during the memorial service for his wife Shirley. Their son Brian played Danny Boy.

40

Life begins.

I finally hit midlife as 2007 drew to a close and on that day I thought of my father who passed away untimely at the same age. He was abroad in 1990, terminally ill, and had made one final bargain with life to return home and spend his remaining days with his family. Unfortunately, he died on the plane on his flight back to the Philippines. To this day I still wonder where and when exactly it happened, his passing. He was alive when he boarded the plane. He had signed the airline waiver and slept through the flight. Did death occur mid-air, across seas or over another country? Or did he slip away when the plane reached its final destination, his children waiting in an ambulance in the country of his birth?

The question hounded me on my fortieth birthday, if only because, like him, midlife found me elsewhere, away from home. Nothing uncommon, but profound just the same: how, for some of us, we mark the passing years with great distances covered, reflecting on the skins we have shed and the boundaries of home we have redefined along the way. All the while we are sustained by the increasingly fogged memory of our origin. And finally here I am at forty, seeking solace in imagining my father’s final moments: my father at peace above the clouds while on the ground, red lights blinked and sirens wailed.

The day I turned forty I was visiting my silver-haired friend Shirley in Novato in the North Bay. That afternoon I found myself inside her garage, jabbing at her speed punching bag.

“Harder!” she said, her voice hoarse. “You can do better than that.”

I smiled sheepishly and with fists clenched, recalled my father’s suspended crossing.

“Hit it forty times,” Shirley said. “And don’t cheat.”

“I’m counting,” I assured her, grinning through the rapid flash of memories and each knocked-down year.

The final blow was exhilarating, later celebrated with glasses of Goldschlager raised around me, the clear cinnamon liquor swirling with flecks of gold leaf.

We capped my birthday in a Thai restaurant, my palate kicked by the spicy memory of Thailand, the country that was home to me for more than a decade before I moved to the United States – squid salad in peppermint and lime dressing; seafood sautéed on basil leaf, coriander and red chilies for the main course; complimentary mango with sticky rice for dessert; and finally, a lit birthday candle on top of scoops of vanilla ice cream with coconut bits.

Shirley’s roommate David had joined Scott and me, completing the same quartet that gathered the year before. Their gesture to host my 2006 birthday dinner was exceedingly gracious back then considering they had known me for only a week or so. How reassuring to have the same faces gathered again after a year. Same faces but not really. Like scarred warriors who have returned home, our deeper transformations were underscored by how much everything around us has remained unnervingly the same.


On the chilly morning of December 21, 2007, I woke up wearing Scott’s birthday present, a black eco-drive wristwatch charged by the sun. For someone born on the eve of winter solstice - the time of the year when the day is shortest and the night longest - the solar timepiece offered the gift of urgency and vigilance. Remain charged, more nocturnal battles ahead: a valiant urging which reminds me of the first poem I memorized at the age of eight.

That year, in 1976, my dramatic rendition of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade won me honors in a school talent contest in my Philippine hometown. I was oblivious then of the historical events that inspired the writing of the poem, a disastrous cavalry charge that took place on October 25, 1854 in Ukraine, where a military blunder led to the heroic sacrifice of the British cavalry under the crushing might of Russian forces. I was a mere child. Where on earth did I draw the pathos required to interpret the poem’s thunderous and tragic call to arms, to charge “into the mouth of hell… into the valley of death”?


I remember being guided by a short, dark-skinned woman: Noemi Manlapaz, my talent coach. She had an intriguing expression, eyebrows raised into a steeple as if in perpetual pain, the blessed agony of a martyr burning on the stake. As a young girl, her thespian talent was pitted against another rising dramatist in town, the young Lino Brocka, who would go on to become an honored national artist and an internationally-acclaimed filmmaker.

“This was Lino’s winning piece,” Noemi said, handing me a typewritten copy of the poem. She then turned to my mother and instructed her from then on to wake me up before sunrise. “Make sure the poem is the first thing he reads when he wakes up and the last thing he reads before he goes to bed at night.”

My mother also made sure that my voice was well taken care of in reciting the poem’s rousing battle cry in the cold, dark hours before daybreak and midnight. She made me drink hot “salabat”, a traditional Filipino beverage brewed with fresh ginger and brown sugar.

For two months, I dutifully embraced this routine, learning by heart the mysterious words (Cossack?), phrases (Half a league?), lines and stanzas. The training itself took place at dusk. After school, I would meet Noemi at her home, a bungalow facing a rice field. I came prepared -- and it wasn’t just the memory of the poem already lodged in my brain, or the salabat-enhanced voice -- I would meet her with an intensity, the source of which was unexpected, dark, and of my own discovery.

To reach Noemi’s house, I had to walk around an old, iron-fenced, public elementary school compound that occupied an entire block. Fifty feet high caimito trees shaded the single-storey buildings inside. The fruit tree itself is native to Central America, brought to the Philippines by the Spaniards who came to evangelize and colonize the country. Behind the trees stood wooden schoolhouses that date back to the American colonial period in the early part of the 20th century, and later converted during World War II as headquarters of the Japanese army. I had no knowledge of this history when I was growing up or at least I had not paid careful attention to it. I was drawn instead to stories of haunting at the San Jose West Elementary School, unaware then that our colonial histories are very much like the ghosts I had heard of, unsettled spirits that sets up home in the creaking house of forgetting. One story involved fingers.

(to be continued...)

Home for the Holidays

From North America to Europe to the Middle East and Asia, the Filipinos' wandering journal makes a stop in my hometown in Nueva Ecija, Philippines. Just in time for the holidays -- before it moves on to complete the final leg of its journey around the world.

I am turning forty tomorrow. Birthday wish granted. In a way, I made it home through my notebook project. My photos and stories, along with those who joined our moleskine notebook's amazing journey are now back where all my stories began.

It is currently with poet Shubert Ciencia of the Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement. The last pit stop before the notebook is returned to me is Daphe Osena Paez, host of ABS-CBN's award-winning show, Urban Zone.





below: The notebook with former senator and nationalist Bobby Tanada, PRRM president Ding Navarro and former political detainee Gani Serrano.





I just got an email regarding the whereabouts of the other notebook. Currently with fashion photographer Chris Perez, the notebook will be spending the holidays in Baguio City. (Hometown photo taken by bigberto).

The Ruins of Quiapo, San Franscisco and Angkor

Kuha ni JM Chua ang larawan sa itaas. Ito naman ang masasabi ko tungkol sa kuha niya:

Wala ng mas hihiwaga sa lugar na ito, mas didilim, mas sisikip, mas nakakagutom, mas nakakabusog.

Matagal na panahon at maraming tanghaling tapat din akong naging anino sa kalyeng ito. Maraming baha ang linusong hanggang hindi ko na alam kung sino sa kanila, sino sa amin ang multo.

Maraming tinuro sa akin ang lugar na ito: sa bingit at sa mga gahiblang pag-asa mo pala mararamdaman kung paanong maging buhay na buhay sa mundo. Marami akong aral na napulot: tungkol sa dangal at kabutihan at kung paano itong umuusbong sa gitna ng poot at pagngatngat sa mga tirang buto ng lipunan.

Malaki ang utang ng loob ko sa lugar na ito. Dahil sa lugar na ito mas malalim ako ngayon kung ngumiti, mas matagal umiyak, mas nagliliyab pag nagalit at mas nakalulunos pag nagpatawad. Lahat kaming mga probinsyanong nangarap lumuwas sa maynila -- binago kami ng lugar na ito, in ways we could never have imagined.

Salamat JM. Gusto ko talagang balikan ang lugar na ito. Balang araw. Siguro next year. Sana matapang pa rin ako kung hindi man kasingtapang mo. At sana dala ko rin ang camera ko.

Eto naman ang contribution ni JM sa lagalag project:



"Ampangit sa Pilipinas. Mahirap, magulo, masalimuot, walang asenso, nililisan ng tao, puno ng mga pulitikong walang inisip kundi sariling pangkapakanan, walang seguridad, 'di mo alam kung may dadatnan ka pang trabaho pagpasok mo sa opisina, laging may nakaabang na panganib paglabas mo sa kalsada, sa sasakyan o kahit sa mall, pugad ng terorista, ekonomiyang walang kalatoy-latoy, napapaligiran ka ng mga taong nanlilimahid, mga batang walang makain, tambay, adik, out-of-school youth, sinasagasa mo sa pangaraw-araw na biyahe ang abot-leeg na polusyon, ingay, madayang konduktor na kulang magbigay ng sukli... at para saan? Mamamatay ka sa 'Pinas nang dilat ang mata.

Pero nandito ka pa 'rin. Hnlabo mo, mehn.



"Minsan, naisip ko na 'rin na mangibang-bayan. Pero nandito pa 'rin ako, sa maliit na sulok ng mundong ito.

May ganda pa ang Pilipinas kung magmamasid ka ng mabuti. Parang isang litrato, kung saan kailangan mong ihiwalay ang iyong magandang "subject" mula sa kanyang nakagugulong background.

Sapat pa naman ang kinikita ko para sa aking pagkain, maliit na selda, pusa at minsang luho. Nandito ang karamihan ng aking kamag-anak, kaibigan at iba pang karakter na 'di ko na maihiwalay sa aking pangaraw-araw na buhay. Natutunan ko nang tawanan ang Pinoy pulitika gaya ng mga taong nanlilimahid sa paligid ko. Dito ko natutunang umibig, mabigo, at umibig pang muli. Dito ako namulat kung paanong maging "smarte" o madiskarte para sa araw-araw na pagsagasa sa buhay bilang isang pangkaraniwang Juan de la Cruz. Nandito ang magulo ngunit makulay na buhay na hindi ko pa nakita o narinig sa iba pang lugar. Mamamatay akong dilat ang mata, may ngiti sa aking labi at napaliligiran ng aking mga mahal sa buhay. Iyan ang malinaw sa akin, kaya nandito pa 'rin ako."

Below, photos I took of Angkor Wat and excerpts from Rebecca Solnit's essay, The Ruins of Memory:



"Panoramic photographs taken after the 1906 earthquake show that the old San Francisco is gone, replaced by jagged, smoldering spires and piles of ruins. Photographs made a century later demonstrate that the ruins are likewise gone, erased more definitively than the earthquake erased the nineteenth century city. Ruins represent the physical decay of what preceded them, but their removal erases meaning and memory. Ruins are monuments, but while intentional monuments articulate desire for permanence, even immortality, ruins memorialize the fleeting nature of all things and the limited powers of humankind... To erase decay or consciousness of decay, decline, entropy, and ruin is to erase the understanding of the unfolding relation between all things, of darkness to light, of age to youth, of fall to rise. Rise and fall go together; they presume each other.



"In another sense, everything is the ruin of what came before. A table is the ruin of a tree, as is the paper you hold in your hands; a carved figure is the ruin of the block from which it emerged, a block whose removal scarred the mountainside from which it was hacked; and anything made of metal requires earth upheaval and ore extraction on a scale of extraordinary disproportion to the resultant product. To imagine the metamorphoses that are life on earth at its grandest scale is to imagine both creation and destruction, and to imagine them together is to see their kinship in the common ground of change, abrupt and gradual, beautiful and disastrous, to see the generative richness of ruins and the ruinous nature of all change... Corpses feed flowers; flowers eat corpses. San Francisco has been ruined again and again, only most spectacularly in 1906, and those ruins too have been erased and forgotten and repeated and erased again."

The Magic of Hanalei Bay

(Photos I took of my cousin Levy and his friends in Oahu, Hawaii)

A few days ago, I bought a book for my nephew Iona. I have introduced its story to him as a song written by Peter Yarrow of the renowned folk group Peter, Paul and Mary. Lenny Lipton, who wrote the afterword, was a 19-year old Cornell student when he wrote the poem that inspired the sixties counterculture song that became a hippie anthem that is now the book in my nephew's hand. The germ of it all was an Ogden Nash poem, "Custard, the Dragon"; and as we all know in the 1963 song - later banned in Singapore because of its supposedly subliminal references to dope - the magic dragon lived by the sea in a land called Honalee. But where realy is Puff's Honalee? Lipton shares this story about a trip to Hawaii:



“…There are many what-ifs along the way to Puff. I left a poem in Peter Yarrow’s typewriter and he added some new lyrics and turned it into a song. If I had taken what I had written seriously, I would have kept that piece of paper and Peter might have never seen it. And if Peter hadn’t met Paul and Mary, it’s probable that nobody would have ever heard of Puff.

“I was once on the island of Kauai with my family and friends and we came across a gigantic lava cave on the edge of Hanalei Bay. My friend asked me how I came to set Puff, the Magic Dragon here and I told him the truth: I had never heard of Hanalei and I had no idea it had a cave for a dragon. I can’t explain it, and like so much of life, this is another mystery to accept and enjoy."



The book by the way has a happier ending. Now I'm not sure if that made the purists and the hippies happy but during my recent trip to Hawaii to visit my grandmother, I met my 23-year old cousin Levy Ordonez, who moved to the US from the Philippines a few years ago. He drove me around the island of Oahu. We have a seventeen year age difference so it was like Little Jackie Piper being reunited with old Puff. Levy was only seven when I first met him in Cagayan de Oro, in the southern island of Mindanao. Many mornings, we would wake up early and hike to a memorial park on top of a hill. He reminded me of the caterpillar we found there, brought back home with us and nurtured, until it turned into a butterfly and died. “We went back to the memorial park and buried it there,” Levy reminded me.

“We even gave it a name,” I reminded him.

“Yeah, I think we did,” Levy said. “But I can’t remember what we called it.”

I told him that I too had forgotten its name - painted wings made way for other toys. But Levy remembered the native trinket I always wore in my early twenties; and the pamukaw, the musical bamboo instrument I played. I got the trinket and the pamukaw from a trip I made to the central highlands of Malaybalay, during the Kaamulan Festival, the setting of the novel I wrote during my stay with Levy’s family. Levy remembered the late nights I spent banging on my manual typewriter.

"I think my sister still has a copy of your book.”



These days, America is Levy’s magic dragon. He has never been to the mainland. Hawaii is very much like his homeland but not really home: tropical weather, Filipinos everywhere. From Cagayan de Oro in the Philippines to Waipahu, Hawaii, he had simply moved from one island to another, his life bound by seashores. The seashore, according to award-winning essayist Rebecca Solnit, is an edge, the only true edge in the world, the place that is no place, sometimes solid land or sand, sometimes that huge body of water governed by desire, a body of water that is always traveling. A high school friend has invited Levy to visit Ohio. “I heard it’s really cold in Ohio,” Levy said and wondered about what fall is like, thrilled by the thought of walking on a carpet of red and yellow leaves. “But I’m not sure." He turned pensive. "Maybe I will have to go back to the Philippines.” My cousin finds himself in a familiar conundrum: as another dragon begins to cease its fearless roar, another beckons to frolic with him in the autumn mist.



I was in Elliot Bay bookstore in Seattle last fall, the city's legendary independent bookstore named after the body of water on which the city is located. It was there where many years ago, I bought a copy of Patricia Hampl's I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory. Last fall, I bought Rebecca Solnit's Field Guide to Getting Lost at Elliot Bay. Both writers immensely influenced me by validating the recurring questions and themes in my own writings. A few months ago, I bought Solnit’s latest essay collection, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics. The book ends with a coda on the Pacific. Below are excerpts from the essay - dedicated to Iona, Levy, and the Jackie Piper in all of us, beachcombing, holding seashells to our ears, our hearts stopped by the anticipation of familiar roars.



The seashore is an edge, perhaps the only true edge in the world whose borders are otherwise mostly political fictions, and it defies the usual idea of borders by being unfixed, fluctuant, and infinitely permeable. The seashore is the place that is no place, sometimes solid land or, rather, sand, sometimes the shallow fringe of that huge body of water governed by the remote body of the moon in a mystery something like lover or desire. A body of water is always traveling, and so the border between the life and the sea is not a Hadrian’s Wall or a zone of armed guards; it’s a border of endless embassies, of sandpiper diplomacy and jellyfish exportation, a meeting or even trysting ground. An open border but a dangerous one between the known and the unknown, which only a few sybils, amphibians, crustaceans and marine mammals traverse with impunity. The shore is also the site of the mutual offerings of the dead, our drowned, their beached, another edge effect, this washing up of corpses, metaphors and myths. The mind is such a meeting ground: its ideas are less often laboriously thought out than suddenly washed up from unknown hatcheries and currents far beneath the surface, the dry ideas of logic that drown in the sea; the dreams that, like whales, die crushed by their own weight they wash up on a shore in the morning; and amphibious poetry in between, for the seashore also suggests the border between fact and imagination, waking and sleeping, self and other, suggests perhaps the essential meeting of differences, essential as in primary, essential as in necessary. Wandering the coastline with downcast eyes to find what there is to be found, a material correlation to composing and thinking, is a disreputable profession with its own word, beachcombing. Shopping at one’s feet for stories, for the unknown, for the thing lost so long no one can no longer name it, for the treasure that will transform, for that inhuman material that sets free whatever is most human and immaterial. For adults, there is the question of how to set the eyes – whether to beachcomb or more upliftedly regard the view of sea and land – but for children, who have not yet learned that rocks and shells will generally dwindle into rubbish away from the shore, combing the beach is irresistible. Beachcombing, to comb the beach as though it were the hair those mermaids are forever combing with one eye on the sailors, for there is a litter of images, metaphors, inspirations that are more portable and better-looking removed from the beach than its physical stuff…



… A person who nearly drowns is more readily revived if her lungs are full of seawater rather than freshwater, for the sea, just as salty as the body does, does not dilute the blood and burst the cells. It was the sea in which all life evolved, we were all told long ago; and somewhere further along in biology, blood became on kind of salty ocean circulating nutrients, oxygen, flushing toxins and detritus along the estuaries and channels of the body, and amniotic fluid another sea in which each floated in darkness the first nine months of life, until, as they say, the waters broke. But where I come from, the first people say that originally Coyote or Raven or Creator drew a solid land up as a fistful of mud from the spreading waters, and the ones who live on the coast say that the dead go west over the sea when they die, the place that every river on this Pacific slope runs to…

One thing leads to another: there are the seashells children are told to hold to their ears to hear the sea, and only later are they told that they are listening to the inward sea of their own body’s pulses echoing in the seashell that was itself once a favorite metaphor for a delicate ear… Call it a sea of amniotic fluid, the fluid in which life generated, but uterine hardly describes this most open space under the sky unless to the most wide-open imagination…



… “In all rivers and oceans,” says Melville a little later, “is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.” The linear narrative of following the coast, the plot, the history, the sequence of pages versus the steady rhythm of tides, the waves, the desires. The book and the sea turn into each other at the end, a stranding of black letters on the paperwhite shore, and the pages of a book at the windy seashore blow one over another like waves, a curl, a comb of pages…



… The sea that always seems like a metaphor, but one that is always moving, cannot be fixed, like a heart that is like a tongue that is like a mystery that is like a story that is like a border that is like something altogether different and like everything at once. One thing leads to another, and this is the treasure that always runs through your fingers and never runs out.

Neptune, I Ching and I Chess

Chess is life - Bobby Fischer

Chess is not life... it has rules! - Mark Pasternak

The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature, and the player on the other side is hidden from us. - Thomas Huxley

It was late at night and this was a very long time ago, sometime between the 1986 revolution and the 1990 earthquake. Frank Cimatu and I, both in our early twenties, were walking home drunk, weary with the weight of our unpublished poems and stories. It was cold and quiet and we were staggering up and down the dark, empty rolling streets of New Lucban in Baguio City. It was then when we saw the car moving slowly uphill towards us. Its lights were off and it was followed by a silent procession of bowed men and veiled women, probably a dozen or so of them, all in black. Frank and I continued walking until the funeral march passed, turned to a corner and disappeared. I asked Frank if he knew anybody who died in the neighborhood. He said no. It took awhile before it occurred to us how odd it was, this late night funeral procession. We kept walking but we both knew it weighed heavily in our minds, how strange and eerie it was, how there was something very wrong with what we just saw, because at one point we stopped. I can't remember who asked who but the question had to be asked. We had to reassure each other that we just saw the same thing. It scared the shit out of us. Maybe it wasn't a funeral or maybe we're just drunk. Still there was no denying it, we saw the same thing. And if it wasn't a funeral, what was it?

Last week, I told Scott that I just woke up from a dream, and in that dream, he woke me up from a dream. So I was telling him about this strange dream within a dream. I was under the sea, I had told him in my dream. And I had dreamt of the sea god. I think it was Neptune, I had told Scott in my dream. Why I had recalled the Roman god instead of the Greek Poseidon, I don't know. I do know that over the past weeks, I have been posting blog entries about the sea and death after reading a chapter on the sea in Robert Pogue Harrison's book, Dominion of the Dead. Anyway... I did not know what to make of the dream and would have forgotten it completely if not for a call Scott received an hour or so later. It was his father crying on the other line. Scott's mother had just passed away.

In the Fall 2007 issue of Zoetrope: All-Story, Francis Ford Coppola's literary magazine, academy-award nominated film editor Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, The English Patient) wrote a fascinating essay about I Ching, chess and the cinema. And how the number 64 connects us all:

Both chess and the I Ching are profoundly successful attempts to represent and play with - or cope with - the bewildering complexity of life: they are worlds (with rules) unto themselves. Both are ancient: the I Ching (literal translation: The Book of Change) is perhaps five thousand years old, chess half that. The I Ching originated in China, chess came from India - both are products of the collective wisdom of great cultures. And both are intimately connected with the same number, 64: the chessboard has eight squares on a side - and the square root of eight is 64; the I Ching is made up of six-letter "words" drawing on an alphabet of two letters - and 2 to the 6th power is 64. Is this a coincidence? Perhaps. But consider hypothetical chessboards with nine squares on a side, or only seven. Or an I Ching with septagrams (128 of them), or quintagrams (only 32). There would be either too many variables, or not enough: excess or constraint. Somehow 64 seems to be - for the human mind, at least a manageable "Goldilocks" number whose possible permutations are still enormous enough to approximate life in all complexity.

And not only for the human mind: it was discovered in the 1950s that life itself depends on the number 64. The genetic code is made of up the four molecular "letters" found in DNA (A, C, G, T), and these are used to spell "words" (officially: codons) three letters in length - AGT, GAT, CTG etc. The "Sentences" (officially: genes) written with these three-letter words determine the orders and kinds of proteins out of which our cells - all living cells - are constructed and arranged. And it turns out that words three letters long made from a four-letter alphabet give 64 possible words: 4 raised to the 3rd is 64. Yet billions upon billions of different genetic sentences can be written with these sixty-four words, producing the spectacular variety of life on earth. And for all we know, life anywhere in the universe.

In the family living room in Daly City, Scott sat right next to the bed where his mother's body lay. I stood behind him. We were facing the door. Ken, Scott's ninety-year old father, told us that she passed away at twenty-two minutes to eleven. 22 to 11, the numbers instantly clicked in his mind - that's when he met his wife, November 22. At around four in the afternoon, the door opened and two men from the cremation service walked in to take away Scott's mother. From where I stood I saw the truck outside. Look Scott, I whispered, pointing at the truck. I reminded him of my dream that morning. He gasped. A sign, painted on the white truck in big letters, identified the cremation service' company owner: The Neptune Society.