cocoro

Back in Manila

--from a reading conference in Bacolod, which was exhausting and a bit surreal.  I learned a lot and it was an interesting experience all in all but I expect it's the sort of conference which one has to attend year after year in order for one to acclimatize.  I intend on going next year fyi.

My landlady sent me an SMS message while I was in the conference informing me that I'd have to vacate my unit by January 2008 as her niece is moving in. She was quite apologetic about it. I'm grateful for the advance notice as it leaves with me a lot of time to look for a new place.

I'm also honestly relieved about the pending move. While I've liked living in my apartment, I've lately caught myself wanting to live someplace... with a lot more sunlight, for one. With old rattling windows. With wood floors.  I'm not a fan of condo living, having grown up in an aged house belonging to my grandparents in the province. I slept in a room which belonged to my father when he was a child. At night my grandmother would leave the capiz windows wide open. I would fall asleep watching the moon, corny as that may sound.

I desperately want to recapture that, as my grandmother is now in a hospital and dying, little by little, and there are no windows to look out of anymore.

Fencing

I watched Equilibrium again the other night and finally finished the movie. I didn't the first time because I got called away just when Christian Bale was listening to Sean Bean reading Blake, alas. My brother who watched the movie with me spent most of the time exclaiming over what is called, offhandedly, the 'Gun-Kata' fights. He has an aversion to swords and though he declares himself a fan of Chinese action films, he refuses to watch any movie that features a swordfight, even minor ones (which should cancel out maybe 75% of his declared fandom denomination). He feels that Equilibrium's approach to the seemingly irreconcilable contradiction between the respective aesthetics of sword and gun is just perfect. (I tell him, as a matter of principle, that the issue is not so much about aesthetics as his regrettably low squick threshold. ). In the movie, members of the elite and ruling Grammaton Cleric wield their guns in a way that is... very Hiten Mitsurugi Ryuu, Kenshin kicking ass in Final Fantasy sans Roman numerals. The mediating factor is not classical fencing strategy applied to gun duels; it's more anime fodder within the context of hyped military simulation. The director and stunt coordinators say pretty much the same thing (though in less convoluted prose.)

Thinking about it, however... I was reading up on fencing theory a year or so ago while writing something and came upon this book entitled "Libro que trata de la philosophia de las armas, y de su destreza, y de la agressión y defensión christiana" via Richard Cohen. It's by Don Jeronimo de Carranza and was published mid-16th century in Seville and is recognized as the earliest treatise on fencing in Spain. The thesis of the book is rather abstruse -- less charitable fencing thereoticians and historians say flat out that it's ridiculous -- but when I watched Equilibrium, I thought I could see how it might work. Ironically.

Carranza called his system 'la destreza' (the high art) rather than esgrima (fencing). He believed that the entire education of a gentleman -- mathematics, science, philosophy, art -- should be applied to the management of arms, most notably the science of geometry. He's presumably channeling Ibn Khaldun somewhere in there ("Geometry enlightens the intellect and sets one's mind right. All its proofs are very clear and orderly...." etc).

So just as Leonardo da Vinci had placed man in a circle in his examination of human proportions, Carranza organized his doctrines around a circle, whose radius bears a cryptic relation to the length of human limbs and Spanish swords. In this 'mystical' circle the vertical axis bisects the body, while a horizontal chord is run through the outstretched arms. The circle is further inscribed in squares and intersected by various chords that seem to stand for certain strokes and parries. The fencer was expected to imagine a similar circle around himself and step from intersection to intersection, guided by complicated calculations. This is a bit like the circle in which a Cleric positions himself as he shoots his opponents down applying systematic patterns of firing crossing over with what seems to be imaginary and elaborate physics derived from Carranza's system.

The idea of using guns as if they are swords is pretty interesting, but outside of anime, the Japanese probably won't agree. There's this book by Noel Perrin, also referenced in Cohen, about the history of guns in Japan. Guns were not very popular, even way into early Meiji. Perrin explains that this might be partly due to the fact swords have a more symbolic value in Japan than anywhere else, including the West; swordplay goes beyond what Richard Burton memorably calls 'an ugly exchange of dull lead for polished steel' (or something like that). Swords are not only supposed to be beautiful, they're associated with graceful movement. I don't know if this is truly a cultural fact in Japan, but I'll admit to finding the highly artificial and balletic quality of swordplay in movies more attractive than the sometimes merely raw violence of gunfighting. There's some sort of mystique surrounding it, but it's probably not all breathless romanticism. When you fire a gun, you are placed in a distinctly more ungainly position than when you use a sword. You have to contort your body in defiance of stylistic principles. 'Must separate knees to fire.' Indeed.

Maybe Equilibirum is a compromise -- Christian Bale spends most of his fighting time standing in one place firing like a Zen cowboy and looking very aesthetic -- but then it is just a movie. Who knows, though.

In the name of the father

I never really talk about my father's side of the family, at least compared to my mother's. Where my mother's relatives are a bunch of violent, deviant, capricious, semi-civilized, man-eating, psychotic degenerates, my father's relatives are... organized. They've developed this highly evolved and efficient form of social control where collective neurosis is institutionalized as Family Feeling. Of course batshit crazy is still batshit crazy even if it's, you know, systematic. We have an official clan name (a Kabbalistic acronym combining the first letters of the three main family lineages) which is registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. What's more, we actually have a family constitution. Eighty-five pages.

Yep. Thought so.

I think I've mentioned in a previous entry the extraordinary closeness between my father and his first cousins. The clan, like most provincial Filipino extended families, lives in a huge sprawling tract of land which had been divided neatly by my great-grandparents (both of whom were single children with considerable inheritance) among their nine sons and daughters. I'd wager that our clan owns nearly 50% of the total real estate in our barangay, and we are related to the other 50%. My father, his sister and their cousins literally grew up together. I know I talk way too much about my family, but it's sort of inevitable for me. Any description of my social activities will involve my family in one way or another. My closest friends are usually my cousins, which non-Filipino friends often find to be an odd, even an alien state of affairs. I do have a lot of other friends, people I met in school and at work (and online, of course XD) and with whom I've managed to develop significant relationships, but the network of my social interactions is still circumscribed by family ties. I would suppose it's true for my cousins as well.

The thing is, most of my father's cousins, unlike mine, have never had much chance to interact with people outside family. They rarely even venture to Manila. Some of my them, due to economic difficulties, worked overseas at one time or another, but they almost always ended up living with other relatives working or living in the same place. Even my urbane and terminally fastidious father who's spent nearly all of his professional life travelling and studying abroad reverts to what he calls his 'true self' when he comes back home to meet his cousins. It's this sort of deterministic self-identification which I can't fully sympathize with because, while I am more than aware of my duties and obligations, I've never really defined myself in relation to my family. I'm part of it, but I don't exist in it any more than it exists in me. Cos, well, that's just creepy, don't you think? My aunts and uncles would emit genteel sighs about my newfangled, unfilial, 'third-generation' sensibilities (or should we say, delusions) but I think that in matters such as this I rather prefer my maternal relatives' gleeful, unapologetic, war-mongering, fratricidal ways.

Wuthering Heights

Watched "The Brothers Grimm" and for some reason kept thinking of a movie about the Brothers James all throughout. As in James, William & James, Henry, because that would be... snarky beyond belief, for one. (I know that there have been movies about the Brontes -- I was interested in the 1979 Andre Techine production "Les Soeurs Bronte" starring Isabelle Adjani, but thought it was rather flat. I was expecting a film concentrating on the Brontes as writers instead of metaphysical manifestations of a deconstructive French gloss on the Victorian female mystique. Yeah.)

I'm always a little bemused when I find "Wuthering Heights" interpreted as the ideal of Gothic Forbidden Romance though. It's definitely gothic, but Heathcliff doesn't really bear any resemblance to the dark brooding moody exotic save-me-from-myself heroes he's supposed to be the template of. People seem to forget how psychopathic he's become by the second half of the novel, plus the love (and obsession) he shares with Cathy doesn't so much strike me as neo-Romantically romantic as it is platonically incestuous. Which are not mutually exclusive, of course, but I think that the pattern of their relationship takes more after the Byronic model of brother-sister relationships filtered through German romanticism rather than through overwrought Victorian serials.

Maybe sparrow

Went back to the apartment in good spirits after a dinner with friends but progressively felt more tired and feverish upon arrival, though I couldn't sleep. To divert myself, I picked up a critical edition (with modern English interpolations) of Alfred the Great's Anglo-Saxon translation of the Venerable Bede's Latin history of the Christian foundations of England. I had been meaning to read it but had to finish and organize my thoughts on other books first.

*

I was distracted from my unseemly inward whining about invisible aches and pains by the rendering of one passage, in particular. The scene takes place on the outskirts of York, where the buildings of ancient Eburacum, the Roman capital where Septimus Severus died, were still in only the first stage of their existence as ruins. Edwin, king of Northumberland, at that time the most powerful prince of the British heptarchy, had recently received a request from a Christian missionary to evangelize in his land. He summoned his council. As was fitting, the high priest of the local deities, a certain Cofi, was invited to speak first.

"To be frank, Your Highness," he said in effect, "since I have served our gods and presided over our sacrifices, I have been neither happier nor more fortunate than a man who is not devout, and my prayers have rarely been granted. Therefore, I am in favor of welcoming another god who may be better and stronger, if he can be found."

The priest spoke pragmatically; the leader of the clan who followed spoke as a poet. Asked to give his opinion on the introduction of a god named Jesus into Northumberland, this thane, whose name (according to the scholarly commentary) is unknown, replied:

"The life of man on earth, my lord, in comparison with the vast stretches of time about which we know nothing, seems to me to resemble the flight of a sparrow, who enters through a window in the great hall warmed by a blazing fire laid in the center of it where you feast with your councilors and liege men, while outside the tempests and snows of winter rage. And the bird swiftly sweeps through the great hall and flies out to the other side, and after this brief respite, having come out of the winter, he goes back into it and is lost to your eyes. Such is the brief life of man, of which we know neither what goes before nor what comes after."

The thane's conclusion accords with that of the priest: since we know nothing, why should we not appeal to those who may know? The monk Augustine was then authorized to preach Christianity in Edwin's lands and the rest, as they say, is history.

But setting aside this history and its effects, let's go back to the thane's speech, which I found very interesting. Adveniensque unus passerum domum citissime pervolaverit, qui cum per unum ostium ingrediens, mox per alid exierit. Bede's Latin prose is awkward and yet perhaps still too classical to express the metaphor contained in the passage. Alfred's English, on the other hand: Cume an spearwa and braedlice thaet hus thurhfleo, cume thurh othre duru in, thurh othre ut gewite. (But for all that, it's misleading to fall into the cliche that would set this mental world, which looks forward across a thousand years to the somber poetic universe of Shakespeare's "Macbeth," in opposition to Greco-Latin parameters of thought, which is assumed to be more logical and much less mysterious. It's a matter of epoch, I think -- a hero out of Homer or an Etruscan lucumo might have spoken the same way).

Looking closely at the text, which is beautiful in itself, one perceives that the thane's thought opposes certain age-old habits of mind which persist even today. Those who, like Vigny, see life as a luminous interval between two infinite periods of darkness readily depict those two shadowy zones of before and after as inert and undifferentiated, a kind of frontier of nothingness. For Christians, despite their belief in a blessed or infernal immortality, what will follow after death (they pay little attention to what came before life) is perceived, above all, as eternal rest. Invideo, quia quiescunt, said Luther. For this unknown man, in contrast, the bird issues from a storm and returns into a tempest. Between these two storms, the thane interprets the flight of the bird across the hall as a moment of respite (spatio serenitatis). That's quite surprising. Edwin's thane knew perfectly well that a bird which has flown into a house of men darts about madly, running the risk of dashing itself against walls, of burning itself in the fire. Life as we know it is hardly a moment of respite. Yet, there it is.

*

Of course the image of the bird come out of nowhere and gone back into nowhere is a valid symbol for man's brief and inexplicable passage on earth. One might even go further, and make another symbol of the hall besieged by snow and wind, lit up for a brief moment in the depths of winter -- a symbol, perhaps, for the mind, that lighted chamber, that generating fire, so to speak, placed for each of us temporarily at the center of things, without which neither the bird nor the storm would be either imagined or perceived.

*

To bed, I think. It's so chilly here.

Heights

I feel that I am dying of solitude, of love, of despair, of hatred, of all that this world offers me. With every experience I expand like a balloon blown up beyond its capacity. The most terrifying intensification bursts into nothingness. You grow inside, you dilate madly until there are no boundaries left, you reach the edge of light, where light is stolen by night, and from that plenitude as in a savage whirlwind you are thrown straight into nothingness.

The revenge of the--

My prejudices are few but very, very petty. For one, I hate people who cut in lines. It's a faux pas guaranteed to make me do extremely rude things (though I stop short at actual violence barring a couple of incidents when I shoved the offender right out of my way and was very much tempted to do more. However, my cousin Michelle, who shares my dislike and is considerably more reactive, was actually detained in a police station after nearly tearing out the hair of a girl who cut in front of her in an overcrowded train station during rush hour and kicking the girl's boyfriend's crotch. I think her irritation was compounded by the fact that the couple was all over each other and couldn't care less. Michelle had just broken up with her own boyfriend at that time, and so).

... Where was I? Yes, people I hate. Another species -- and this group is a variation of the above -- includes pushy, hefty, loud, middle-aged matrons who grab people and push them aside and hit them not-so-accidentally with their horrible tasteless canvas bags as they lunge inside the train in order to get first dibs on empty seats. If they don't, they spend the rest of the train ride glaring ostentatiously down at whoever did get a seat and pretending to wobble on their feet, sighing about how the young people today are so rude to their elders ad nauseam. Excuse me, madam, if you're strong enough to knock otherwise harmless passengers out of your way, you can damn well stand for the ten to fifteen minutes it takes to reach your station. With all due respect.

*Doesn't help that my own mother is a notorious repeat offender of aforementioned crimes. But then she's seriously psychotic. She doesn't kick people when they're down because she thinks she's entitled to deferment due to ridiculous parochial notions of moral values, she does it because she likes to win. I remember a rare instance when my mother and I took public transport together. The MRT station was filled with people, as usual. I left her in a corner and told her to stay put while I bought tickets and resignedly stood at the end of a very long line. Five minutes later, I saw her jumping up and down and yelling at me... from in front the ticketmaster window of the express lane (the line to which was even longer than the regular ticket lanes). Needless to say, I was horrified. When I fought my way over to her, I found out that not only did she not have exact fare money, she also refused to make way for the poor man standing behind her while she demanded me to supplement her change. The ticketmaster was by this time pounding on the window and ordering Mom to get in line. Mom only pounded the window back and told him to shut up because she was a Filipino citizen (whatever that meant). Thankfully, between the two of us, we managed to cover our fare and I dragged her over to the waiting platform. She was very pleased with herself.

"Mom," I said, "if I had been the person standing behind you, you'd be seriously tied down on the tracks by now. I mean it."

"Why?"

"Okay, let's try to put this more philosophically. If you had been standing in line for nearly twenty minutes in a very hot and overcrowded situation and suddenly this rude, overbearing, totally insensitive person cuts in front of you, what would you have felt?"

She looked askance at me for stating the obvious. "I'd have killed them."

"That's right. So why did you do it?"

"It's different if it's me."

"How so?"

"In the first place, if they're weak enough to allow themselves to be stepped on, they deserve to be stepped on. I am not weak. If someone tries to step on me I'll crush them right back."

"Don't... my god, are you really a mother??? You're not supposed to tell me these things!"

"Of course I am a mother. It was for your sake that I did it. I could never have imagined that my daughter would be an ingrate"

"Okay! Let's drop it."

And so on.

Come to think of it, maybe one reason why I'm so belligerent about people cutting in lines (I admit that I can be a little excessive) is precisely because of my mother's schizophrenic life lessons. Well, it's not as if I can do something about it now, can I.