cocoro

Written on the occasion of my grandfather's death

March 24, 2006

My grandfather died this afternoon from respiratory failure. He was fine when we saw him last Sunday though he was already nursing a mild cold. I didn't pay much attention except to give him a basket of fruit and to make sure that his medicines were up to date. We talked, and my sister massaged his knees, as usual. Lolo had severe arthritis; he never complained about it, but when we asked him what we could do for him, he would smile and ask for a 'little' massage if it didn't inconvenience us. It never did. My cousins and I have all gotten used to having long, rambling conversations with him as we gently rubbed ointment on his knees and legs. I wasn't very good at giving massages, at unknotting hard, unyielding joints, so after a perfunctory knee rub, I would hold his hands and run my fingers over them, poking a bit here, squeezing there, because I knew that his hands hurt him too. His hands were rough and care-worn, but all I could seem to remember now is how soft they were to hold, how comforting, because my grandfather would always grasp my hands back, poking here too, squeezing there too. He told me that I wrote too much and that my fingers would seize up like his in old age if I didn't give them a rest every now and then.

So when I think about his death now, I think about my grandfather's hands. I'm so sad. I've never felt this sad in my life. I finally know what it means to lose something forever. I'll never hold my grandfather's hands again.

I wasn't there when he died. I didn't even know how sick he'd gotten until my brother called me on the phone yesterday afternoon, telling me frantically that Lolo had stopped breathing and that I should come home as soon as possible. It turns out that they'd been trying to contact me since Thursday evening, only I hadn't recharged my phone battery and I didn't turn my phone on until Friday morning. Lolo had been feverish on Wednesday. By Thursday, he was having trouble breathing and his blood pressure was rising astronomically. My brother, grandmother and Uncle Choy took him to the hospital. The ER staff hooked him to an oxygen tank, stabilized his blood pressure, and, after observing him for a couple of hours, decided to discharge him. On Friday morning, my grandfather managed to rouse himself to eat breakfast at my gradmother's behest after which he fell asleep. An hour later, Glen came by to have the oxygen tank replenished. As my cousin Patrick, Kuya Mark's youngest brother, shook Lolo's shoulder to wake him for his medicine, he found to his shock that our grandfather had stopped breathing.

When I called my brother back, he was standing outside the ER and bawling hysterically. He kept repeating that Lolo wouldn't breathe. My grandmother came on the phone and asked me where I was. Her voice was weak and choked from crying, I couldn't hear her. I hung up and walked out of the building. I called my sister who was in the middle of her university final exams and hadn't been informed. She knew that Lolo had been hospitalized but thought that he was already okay. I caught her as she was stepping into the library. She told me later that after I called her, she sat down on the lobby and cried for nearly ten minutes. Kuya Mark called me as I was on my way back to the apartment to get clothes. Sounding vaguer than usual, he said that he was standing by a roadside 'somewhere' and was waiting for 'somebody' so he could go home. When I asked him if he was all right, he said that he couldn't think. We couldn't get hold of Kuya Lloyd, who'd lost his cellphone a few days ago. 

I packed my things in the expectation of staying overnight in the hospital with Lolo. I guess I wasn't thinking too. On my way down the stairs, my father called me and, again, asked me where I was. I think that yesterday was the first time that I'd been asked by so many people in one day about my whereabouts. I told him that I was on my way home. Dad said, "Oh. Okay." in a rough, almost angry voice, and I think that was when I knew. I asked him if there was something else he should be telling me. Dad never said that his father was dead, only that "... your grandfather isn't here anymore." Which does make better sense semantically, I suppose. The fact of Lolo's death pales beside the knowledge that he simply is no longer 'here.' 

Dad told me that they were waiting for me to tell my grandmother. I shouldn't cry, he said. He wasn't asking me to be strong, which at best was an empty euphemism given the circumstances, only to be calm. My mother was flying in from HK later that night, but he and his sister (as it happens, they were both in Malaysia on respective business trips when the news reached them) couldn't catch a flight to Manila until noon the next day. We would have to arrange the funeral arrangements ourselves. Uncle Choy, Kuya Mark's dad, had already picked a coffin but couldn't quite manage to secure a suit of clothes for Lolo to wear since he would then have to tell his mother-in-law what he needed the clothes for.

So I calmly sat on the taxi back to the province and calmly held my ninety-two year old grandmother as she wept and said that her husband had never refused to respond to her voice, until that fateful morning when he simply couldn't speak anymore. So much of their life together consisted of words; it's probably this tender, unceasing flow of conversation which is the essence of my grandmother's grief. I was not so calm when I walked into the morgue, bearing the barong my grandfather wore on Bai's debut and his nattiest pair of formal trousers, and I saw my grandfather's body, wrapped in a simple white blanket. I remember that he used to say to please spare him the indignity and expense of a bourgeois funeral and just wrap his corpse in a winding sheet and then dump it in some hole in the ground. He never did have a high opinion of himself. His hands, when I touched them, were already cold.

My father and aunt decided to hold the wake in a funeral parlor, contravening local tradition (Filipino wakes are usually held in the household of the deceased). My relatives sighed and muttered about how much easier it was for them to help out and respond to our needs if we held the wake at home. They would have to cook food, prepare drinks, run errands etc for the expected deluge of mourners, and having to go back and forth from house to funeral home might cramp their style. As it was, they'd already helped tremendously. I'd seen it in action many times before, though I've never appreciated it so much as I did yesterday--when news reached them that my grandfather had died, they rushed to the hospital, whisked my grandmother back to the house, distracted her with food and talk, cleaned the house from attic to basement, prepared merienda, and organized a car pool. Two hours later, they were ferrying dinner and snacks to the funeral home. 

My cousins arrived later in the evening. Kuya Mark said that he stood for a long time on the other side of the road, paralyzed, unable to go in. Kuya Lloyd arrived around 9PM. When his father told him that there was something he must know, my cousin said that he'd arrived in our grandparents' home with the gates thrown open and people milling about and our grandfather conspicuously absent from his favorite seat by the door. He did know. My sister, when she arrived, could only cry, over and over. She had to stay in the university instead of rushing back immediately because she still had a two-hour final to take. She said that she probably failed it. 

As for me... I'm really rambling here, but listing all these details down thaws my mind somewhat. I've been unable to talk to anyone or to myself continuously since last night.

Five things (1)

In Livejournal, there is a meme wherein a blogger asks her readers to list five things that they usually associate with her, and then the blogger elaborates on them. 

So here are Kristel's associations and my writing about them: 

Being picky about food

I am not! It's more like I eat certain sets of food regularly and ignore everything else, as opposed to discriminating on a case-to-case basis. My lifetime diet can be reduced thus: mung beans, fried chicken, shrimp dumplings, Century Tuna, boiled egg, mango, and Starbucks White Mocha. I don't eat them all everyday, I sort of rotate. For instance, there was a time when I ate nothing but sauteed mung beans for two weeks until finally I got sick of it. Literally sick, because one dinner I decided to pair the dish with a bar of dark chocolate. After that horrid incident I moved on to Century Tuna.

Bibliophilia

To call me a bibliophile is probably not very accurate because I am not attached to the book as a physical object, that is, if we define bibliophiles as avid collectors of books vis-a-vis being avid readers, which I am. According to Wikipedia, oracle of the Internet, I fall under the less prepossessing category of 'bookworm.' I love books for the ideas they contain, not so much for their rarity or binding, though of course one always appreciates well-made books. Now that I am working in a publishing house, I find that I am quite particular about how our books are packaged and manufactured, but that is probably because my publisher is very fastidious and I personally dislike shoddy work and ugly things in general. As a reader, though, I can ignore half-baked jackets and mismatched typography so long as the content is tolerably readable (not necessarily intelligent--such judgments follow after the actual act of reading). 

I know bibliophiles who have acquired substantial--and often specialized--collections of books, which they don't really read. The physical possession of books brings the rush of pleasure. I won't go so far as to say that their libraries merely serve as decorative exhibits because that is not true either. Bibliophilia, like other forms of collecting, has its own semiotics. 

Travel narratives

The travel narratives I read are of the pseudo-ethnological and ironic sort, where the self is simply one other moving object on an uncharted map. I don't really like the generic travel writing currently in vogue, which usually starts with a pretentious novelistic premise and ends with some self-centric epiphany straight out of a bildungsroman. So I like Bruce Chatwin, who is as novelistic and pretentious as one can get, but for whom the geography and politics of place remain an essential part of the narrative and not merely a backdrop against which one's neuroses are played out. If you know what I mean. I dislike George Sand's book on Majorca for these very reasons. 

(Kristel, who is in the process of refining an elaborate taxonomy of her friends and acquaintances, calls my template 'Victorian Orientalist.' I don't really know what she means by this though I suppose I would have made a good little colonialist, writing earnest little vignettes on Central Asian monarchies to be forwarded to a disapproving bureaucrat. Talk about fantasies!)

Sociology

Oh, my first and probably doomed love. I miss research and academic work. In my college years I used to think that my life would be devoted to research and teaching because in my field, one either ends up in social and marketing research, on the one hand, or connected to a university institution, conducting studies on topics ranging from the social context of telenovelas to personality cults. Either way would have suited me fine. I went down the research and think tank route and enjoyed it and would probably have ended up in university after graduate school. 

Instead I am in publishing, which started out as a supposedly short-lived affair but is beginning to resemble a difficult marriage, where decisions don't come easily and you think longingly of divorce every other day or so. But because you love it, even if it's not the sort of love that drove your youthful ambitions, then you put up with it the best way you can, make compromises where possible, and basically just grit your teeth and hang on. 

Reading voraciously

See Bibliophilia.

More to come. 

Morning glory

I woke up very early this morning to the sound of shouting, running feet and slamming doors. For a moment, I thought that a fire had broken out in my floor again, until the shouting started to make sense and I realized that it was just the couple down the hallway engaging in another tiresome quarrel. 

So I went back to sleep. 

The other time, though, there really was a fire, and when I finally decided to roll out of bed--having tried to cover my head with a pillow thinking "God, why don't they shut up?"--and stumble out of my door, I emerged into a corridor starting to fill with smoke. I blinked for a moment, wondering if the infamous couple had somehow incinerated each other (and the entire building while they were at it), and then inhaled a lungful of smoke. I retreated back into my apartment to change into jeans and a shirt before grabbing my keys and a book lying on the couch. The smoke was heavier when I came out. People were running ahead of me, loaded with backpacks and sleeping mats. I debated on whether or not I ought to go back for my laptop before deciding that if worse came to worst and I had to go down the rickety fire exit, I would probably end up dropping it anyway. 

So there was a lot of excitement on the ground floor and people were making sobbing phone calls to their loved ones--just for the drama of it, I suppose, since nobody was hurt--while firemen lugged heavy water hoses up nine floors. Apparently a malfunctioning stove exploded in an apartment unit in the ninth floor. The fire was contained before it could reach the corridors though the firemen had to hose three whole floors so the smoke would dissipate. 

My parents did call me up since I sent them a text message and berated me for staying in my horror movie set of an apartment when they had told me countless times to move out ad nauseam. I decided to make my way up to the second floor where the canteen was still open, serving food and drinks to grumpy residents toting baby carriages and kitchen pans. I had corned beef, eggs, and rice at two in the morning. The book I picked up was an exegesis on notions of death and damnation in 16th century Madrid (DON'T JUDGE ME). I read it while waiting for the firemen to give us a go signal to return to our apartment units. They were pretty excitable and pompous, by the way, for firemen. Kept shouting status reports down the stairs to anxious residents, who really didn't need to know the particulars of their office politics. 

Managed to make my way back to my apartment at around 4AM. The firemen were snappish because it wasn't safe and they said so, so there. Residents just glared at them as they gingerly navigated water pools. Hoses lay strewn on the floor. I was half-expecting to walk into a swamp when I opened my door. Thankfully, all was dry and intact, though the smell of smoke still clung everywhere.

The next day conspiracy theories abounded re: the nature of the fire. According to some suspicious residents, it might have been deliberate arson perpetrated by the building management  to give them an excuse to kick everybody out so they could raze the condo down and rebuild. I wish they wouldn't! I've been looking at old apartment buildings in Quiapo and Manila but none can quite approximate the creepy vibe of my apartment building, if you know what I mean. It must be preserved for posterity. 

Metonymy

Conlon Nancarrow, an American composer who was born in 1912, lived mainly in Mexico and died in 1997. Apparently he mostly wrote for player piano, since he felt that no human performers could produce the sorts of complex sounds at high speeds that he was interested in. But then in old age he started writing for pianists again, and this piece I've been listening to--called Three Canons for Ursula--was one of its fruits. It is what it claims to be: three canons. But the canons are all expressions of mathematical relationships: one is called Canon 5/7, the second Canon 6/9/10/15, and the third Canon 2/3. With each the principle is the same: he starts a melody (generally a very expressive and tonally intricate one) in the left hand, and then joins it with the same melody in the right hand played at a faster speed (in the ratio 5:7 or 2:3, for example), and they then catch up with one another. The second movement has the left hand playing two melodies in canon in the ratio 2:3, then joined by the right hand playing the same two in the ratio 2:3, but with the relationship between the left hand and the right in the ratio 3:5. Oh, and the melodies in the different hands are sometimes in different keys.

FWIW, 'Listen to at least one composition by Conlon Nancarrow' strikes me as both a more interesting New Year's Resolution than the normal vows to exercise more and (ahem) drink less coffee--and one with better chances of success. So that's mine.

Meanings

So after a three-month sojourn into the belly of the beast, i.e., Philippine showbiz, I emerge relatively unscathed and only a little bit disgruntled. What we really did during BB Gandanghari's first three months was calibrate a media campaign. Now BB is transitioning to an honest-to-goodness talent management agency, which hopefully will give her the professional opportunities she needs in an entertainment industry that so far has remained skeptical of her bankability, if not her talent. Rustom was a certified matinee idol and he could be counted on to draw in the crowds. BB is untested. At the moment she's considered a novelty act, interesting by virtue of being 'unusual.' People gravitate towards her as they would gravitate towards freak shows and miraculous apparitions. I have this image of BB being paraded around provincial towns and barangays, with people reaching out to touch the hem of her Miu Miu robe in a morbid parody of the religious procession of saints and votaries. 

BB believes that she has masa appeal, in the same way that the most popular Filipino celebrities like Nora Aunor and Fernando Poe Jr. have masa appeal. But I think she's tapping into a different epistemological framework. Nora Aunor, Vilma Santos, Joseph Estrada and especially Fernando Poe Jr. embodied certain cultural archetypes that transcended their personal failings and tragedies, the smallness of their own lives. But these are archetypes that are rooted in the common ways of living, embedded in history and reality. Fernando Poe Jr. was a solidly realistic hero, even when he was fighting aliens as Panday. He did not dwell in the fantastic. Panday, in the end, was a very pragmatic blacksmith who simply wanted to get rid of the ugly monsters, marry his sweetheart, and send his children to school. 

My boss likes to think that BB is the postmodern babaylan. Neither man nor woman, she straddles both worlds and can lay claim to spiritual ascendancy, as the ancient babaylan did. This is her archetype and one that Filipinos have lost touch with simply because they could not find its rightful personification. I think this is true to a certain extent, but I think that BB's real power, if one can call it that, lies in the power of her story. She is not a character, but a vehicle for a potent narrative of family, loss, suffering, transgression and freedom. 

Baguio

I'm writing this in a cafe in Camp John Hay in Baguio City while waiting for an appointment.  It's mid-afternoon and I'm wearing a jacket, which is something of a novelty for lowlanders like myself. It's a really lovely day though.  

Kuya Gerry invited me to his long-lost nephew's apartment late last night and most of the stories revolved around the horrors of not owning a heater in December and having to navigate foggy streets with poor visibility. Today the sun is out, there's no fog in sight, and people are not walking around hunched and shivering. 

I'm here to give a talk in a company seminar as well as to meet with the editor and possible authors about a book celebrating Baguio's centennial. It's called "Old Baguio" and will contain interdisciplinary essays on Baguio's history, culture and society, or rather the coalescence thereof.  It should be an interesting publication. The editor was telling me yesterday about the various archives in the US where we could find photographic material. I also want to work with the Cordillera Studies Center on this project.   

It's been years since I last visited Baguio. It's a favorite destination in summer for locals who want to get away from the excruciating heat in Manila and the lowlands, but the city gets so congested during March and April that my mother and aunts, who make annual declarations about 'retreating' to Baguio, end up booking us in hot spring resorts in nearby Laguna towns instead.  (If you ask me, soaking in hot springs at the height of summer is not significantly preferable to crawling up Kennon Road when the tourists make a beeline for the mountains. That is to say, I don't get the logic). 

I've forgotten how much I love Baguio, though the forgetting lies in my having lost all sense of its physical presence, because I have not been here in such a long time. Memories of place are tied to particularities of geography as much as to a conceptual framework of events and emotions. I remember looking out to the Cordilleras with my parents as we stood on the porch of our rented house, but while I can still invoke vestiges of the feelings of reassurance and comfort which I felt in my parents' presence, I can no longer see the mountains in my mind. And so the memory has grown less sharp, became more abstract. I might as well have been standing in a porch in Laguna, or in Manila, or Hong Kong. Never Baguio. During college, I harbored fantasies of living in Benguet, in a small shack filled with books, where I would write extended and not so politically correct ethnographic treatises. But it was an impressionistic landscape which I conjured in my mind. All feeling and fantasy, no history. 

Being here makes me realize that nostalgia is grounded in the ground I walk on, in the particular arrangements of trees by the wayside, in the shape and taste of food, the heft of cloth, the movements of people around me. The best retrospectives are silent ones. Conversatios are muted, laughter is soundless, and all you see is the world settling around you. 

Beautiful freakishness

I see that Time Asia published a feature on Asia's gifted children entitled "Small Wonders." It's really very interesting, Time's more ornate lexical fancies synthesized into existential introspection notwithstanding. "Beautiful freaks," indeed. But geniuses are not always prodigies, and prodigies are not always geniuses. Mozart titillated the European royal courts at the age of four by playing the harpsichord blind-folded; Cezanne taught himself to paint at the age of twenty or thereabouts. (However, Mozart is quite the predistigious, prodigious monkey). So cognitive complexities and variations and recensions with regard to this issue will not be so easily summarized by literary journalism, even when structured in the form of the relatively harmless biographical profile.

Nevertheless, the writers of Time expend considerable column space meditatively pondering the Nature, Life, and Times of the Beautiful Freak. Strangely enough, the children in question do not or, perhaps, would rather not. Ponder, I mean. In times when they (seem to) do so, the meditation is always framed as an eyebrow-raised answer to some gentle leading question: "What does it feel like to be winning chess tournaments at the age of five?" "It's cool. (What the hell are you talking about? You didn't win chess tournaments at five?)" And so on. 

You might then think it would only be logical to expect the equally freak!parents to provide these detailed philosophical expositions, and Time includes quite a few interviews of the aforementioned. But they don't, which shouldn't be unexpected itself. The process of bringing a child into the world is fairly well-documented, in the same way that the process of photosynthesis is well-documented. A child's talents come into the open; they are then hunted down, and bludgeoned into insensibility. That process does imply some complications, but in the same way that a syllogism would present complications when the premises are not stated clearly enough. So it isn't so surprising that a question like "How do you raise a beautiful freak?" should be answered in terms of a practical, objective quantification. Like a tea-blending manual, one might say. You do this and then you do that and you do this and you should be expecting that. If it doesn't taste right, look it up in the Six Theories of Child Development and deduce another methodology therefrom. 

Like, for example, YoYo Ma's father wrote that he started teaching his son to play the cello when he was two. "Coupez la difficulte en matre," which just meant that he would reduce a piece of music to a number of very small short tasks; the child was to master one task a day. That's the same thing he did with Chinese characters. One character a day (which should make that two tasks, but let's not quibble). No beautiful freaks and incandescences and brilliances and the-fate-of-human-whatever, oh no. Just Coupez la difficulte en matre. James Mill was similarly inclined. He taught his son J.S. Greek at the age of three by flashing cards with Greek vocables at him everyday, and he started him in on Herodotus and Xenophon and the Memorials of Socrates and Isocrates and the six dialogues of Plato at six, and he said that what he had done to J.S. could assuredly be done to any child of healthy physical constitution and average capability. And while he did all these things, he was also busy writing a history of India and perchance monographs on Sanskrit, so there was really no chance to write a dialectical Time essay about whys and wherefores and beautiful freaks. 

I doubt I would either, and this is why I don't think I can really be trusted to parent a child, mine or anyone else's, in a way that would not be so tea-manual. Because while I am not a Time writer, do not have the appropriate genes, do not know how to play the cello, and certainly have no intention of writing a history of India, I think I am just curious enough to perhaps devise a very specific way of raising a paleontologist, an astrophysicist, and an expert on Palmyran epigraphs. Just because.

Click to listen

You could write an entire paper about the psychological constitution of the Filipino messiah complex and how this intersects--apparently without contradiction--with the notion of corruption, the slow, graceful degradation of one's moral character. Because one does degenerate gracefully here. It must be the hothouse weather.

Bach

Haven't been sleeping much, still. In lieu of more writing and paper sorting, I've also been listening to Bach, notably Glenn Gould's recordings of the Goldberg Variations. I mention this because I have only just remembered Johann Nikolaus Forkel's biography of Bach, specifically his claim that Bach composed the Variations at the request of the insomniac Count Hermann Karl von Keyserlingk. The Count had the young virtuoso Johann Goldberg in his employ and, according to Forkel, he kept Goldberg awake throughout the night playing the harpsichord. Finally, the Count asked Bach to compose a piece of music for Goldberg (who was himself a student of Bach), something to lull him to sleep or, at the very least, enliven his sleepless nights. Thus, the Goldberg Variations.

The story is almost certainly apocryphal, but it's interesting nonetheless (or perhaps because of). I myself cannot vouch for the soporific quality of the Variations since I have been listening to them for several days now and the earliest I have been to bed since then is one in the morning and then I can't sleep for more than four or five hours.

In other news: I'm also concerned about yet another reading list. I'm buried in so much paperwork nowadays I ought to just lock myself up. But. A group of pastors has asked me to conduct an informal year-long literature seminar/reading group for their organization. I'm not a member of their church (or churches), but some of these pastors have been close family friends for years, and I once taught a series of English tutorial classes for adult church members a few years back, so I couldn't say no. This time, the project will focus exclusively on pastors within the province who, aside from their local constituencies, are also active in international missions. We've had several discussions about the nature of pastoral education in the Philippines--especially in the more obscure and poorer churches--and the pastors I talked to are very critical of its shortcomings. Their program is actually a combination of social work, local evangelization, and international missions, with particular focus on training missionaries. However, they don't think that they can reach out to as many people as they want to if they will not attempt to go beyond their admittedly parochial orientation with regard to secular matters. So to address this perceived defect, they decided that one of the first steps they need to take is, quite simply, to broaden/update their education. Most of them are college graduates but given the fact that--save for the bigger and better-funded universities--college education in the Philippines, especially in colleges outside Manila, is not exactly what you would call cosmopolitan, that's not saying a lot.

Anyhow, they can't afford to go to special classes in college (and the community college doesn't offer any such course) so they settled on me, perhaps because seeing me with my nose perpetually buried in a book from childhood on has led them to think that I might actually be something of an expert in haha literary (i.e., reading) matters. Another, more experienced teacher is taking over the 'technical' English class. I would much rather be teaching the use of subjunctives since you have little room--latitude, actually--for mistakes, you just follow what the workbook says. But compiling a reading list? and conducting a literature seminar for pastors? is another matter altogether. I won't deny that the project interests me, but then I've always had a stupid weakness for uh idiosycratic projects. (And I didn't really think of my schedule when I agreed, my mother is going to kill me.)

I've been turning over the concept of the reading list for days. I can always give a diagnostic test so I can relativize the list to the pastors' reading comprehension level in English and so on, but that's just, I dunno, sort of counter-productive? Even given the fact that they've admitted that the only things they actually read in any depth are the Bible and the newspaper, I don't see how they can radically 'update' their literary horizons with a facetious sampling of what might be classified as easy reading material (you know, stuff straight out of high school textbooks). It's not as if their English is bad, only that they've never really tried to cultivate it or to improve their fluency in the language through reading. Besides, they said that they wanted to learn new things so that they'll have a wider range of sources to draw from when confronted with, say, a Sikh who has read Thucydides and Jane Austen.