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.
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.
I dreamed that I was in a car with President Marcos
and we were driving to Manila from Ilocos to attend a concert at the
Cultural Center of the Philippines. However, because of the torrential
rains, we found ourselves stuck in a flooded highway. Marcos was
barking commands at his aides through a radio and I heard him tell them
to fetch us on a helicopter NOW. I borrowed his cellphone so I could
contact my mother and inform her where I was. She was not pleased.
So it's not enough that I've been dreaming I was married to weird papercut detectives, I should also find myself exchanging opinions about French ballet (and sharing a car!) with dead, power-hungry dictators on the side?
You will hear thunder and remember me,
And think: she wanted storms. The rim
Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson,
And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.
That day in Moscow, it will all come true,
when, for the last time, I take my leave,
And hasten to the heights that I have longed for,
Leaving my shadow still to be with you.
-- Anna Akhmatova, translated by DM Thomas
Written on March 14, 2007:
A close friend of mine died last Friday of an aneurysm. Mr. G. I call him Tito Gio IRL, but it seemed weird to do so in writing. Funny how in Filipino there's no default mode of address for older people who aren't your blood relatives but with whom you share a degree of closeness. Everyone inevitably lapses to 'uncle' or 'auntie.'
I'm rambling, I'm sorry. I guess I'm trying to elucidate the nature of my friendship with Tito Gio and what it meant to me and I'm making a mess of it.
He was 48 when he died, so he was much older than I was, but in the year we spent together trying to launch the Cabuyao Literary Society, he never tried to use any of that against me. Not his age or his experience or even his considerable abilities. He was always very supportive and generous of his talent. He had a great love for the arts and he believed that there was a place for it in our community despite the lack of support and funding.
Before I met him, he already had a long record in civic work. He had served on the PTA board of our community high school for many years. The school was severely under-funded. It was often short of teachers, equipment, and basic services, so the PTA had a proactive role in trying to keep it together. As president and director, Tito Gio spearheaded fund drives, launched information campaigns, worried about break-ins and wayward students and no books in the library, wrote the student handbook, took photographs of important school events. He had a profound concern for the welfare of the students and yet felt impotent in the face of the odds stacked against them. He studied them minutely, these despairing, endangered young people, noting the lack of structures for socialization, the teaching of ethics, the right to self-definition. But he was frustrated in his efforts to channel his ambitions into a coherent plan for action, until, he said, CLS came into his life.
We used to joke in the group that we found each other by 'kismet.' We would have run into each other sooner or later, but when we did, it was at the right time and at the right place in our lives. Hence the crappy jokes about planetary alignments etc. Tito Gio always claimed that we were a bunch of lunatics, the biggest fools in town, but, typically, also approached our 'antics' with deadly seriousness. He had a really intuitive commitment to the group. There wasn't much to base your faith on, anyhow, except for intuition. Because he was right, we were fools, right from the beginning. We had high-minded ideas but he knew that our follow-throughs could sure do with a lot of work. And yet he stayed. He was there for the balagtasan, went around town talking about the website and promoting the group, finessed the founding of the theater, linked us up with people we needed to know, planned and dreamed.
I didn't know him for very long. When I went to the wake, the only people I recognized--aside from the other people in CLS (Kuya Mark, Dee, Tito Elmer)--were his wife and mother, so you could say that I didn't know him very well either, at least not in the conventional sense. Our circles of acquaintance outside of CLS did not intersect. He was much older, there was that, but there was also the fact that the work we wanted to do, our beliefs, were enough to bind us and establish a camaraderie that would otherwise be hard-earned, if not impossible. We shared not so much friendship as a communion. He said that he had always been hoping and waiting for something like CLS to happen. If he had not married young, if he did not have a family to support, he would have tried this long ago, but he was afraid to do it alone. So the group gave him the courage he needed. Kismet. He believed in it.
In some ways, CLS had been something that was private among us. Our families were usually disapproving of our 'activities.' It was not as if we had decided to overthrow the government, but, in a community which valued and inflated notions of propriety, asserting oneself, declaring difference and change merely through initiating something 'new', meant that you did not have to take up arms in order to be considered improper. It's hard to appreciate and project the importance we gave to the group. I think if I were to die now, my parents would consider CLS as just another one of those 'things' I wasted my time on. In the same way, perception of Tito Gio's part in the organization would probably be all out of proportion to how much of himself he gave to it. So I'm using this opportunity, on the record, so to speak, to make clear that he gave, and he gave a lot.
I passed by his house last Sunday and we outlined our plans for the summer. It was the last time I saw him alive. He wanted to develop a website covering candidates for the municipal elections this May (a print version could also serve as our newsletter for the summer), set a date for an initial meeting with prospective members of the classical guitar circle we both had an interest in setting up, plays for the theater, a possible photography exhibit the sinakulo in Bigaa. I told him about my trip to Hong Kong, the vagaries of my illness, how weak and discouraged I was after RodCon, and that now, for the first time in what seemed like a long, long time, I felt like I could enjoy the world again. He said, in his sincere, gentle way, that he was very happy for me. And also that it was a good thing I was up to snuff because there was an awful lot of work to do and he didn't think I was the sort to wallow in self-pity. Now, back to that newsletter idea.
We were supposed to have
years to watch this thing unfold, you know. Make costly mistakes and
pay for them, laugh at politicians behind their backs, meet every
Sunday at the local McDonald's or Saturday nights at Mang Iking's and
gossip interminably about our projects, how the kids were doing,
winning the lotto. Kuya Mark was devastated when he heard the news. I
still can't talk to him about it. Dee refused to believe it at first. I
learned about it on Sunday via Tito Elmer (I had been trying to reach
Tito Gio through phone for our usual weekly meeting) and thought it was
a horrible joke.
I am grateful that I met him. I am grateful
that in the last year of his life (it is exactly one year, how
strange), being involved in the group managed to bring him a measure of
happiness and fulfillment. And beyond this... I guess we have to
continue moving forward, carry on. On my part I feel that his presence
in my life was a very important lesson that I had to learn, only I
don't know if I could ever figure out how to deconstruct it, commit it
to heart.
Talk about a case of mistaken identity. Dear whoever, I think you're looking at the wrong blog.
There are times when I contemplate changing my name to something less generic like... I dunno, K140.
I haven't had time to email people. Will do so this weekend.
We look up at the stars and they are
not there. We see memory
of when they were, once upon a time.
And that too is more than enough.
I do not go home to the province as frequently as I used to ever since my grandmother died. There's also work, of course, but mostly it's because I don't think I can bear to just yet. Christmas was painful; my cousins and I made a half-hearted effort at holiday cheer but in the end spent most of the time lapsing into brooding silence.
My parents are abroad for most of the year, my sister studies in Manila and has her own apartment, and my brother works in Alabang, occasionally sleeping over at my maternal grandparents' house while our own house stands empty. There was a time when I couldn't imagine weekends without family activities being part of the traditional repertoire, so to speak. I would wake up on Sundays to the sound of Miles Davis slowly and coolly spinning a jazz abstraction out of the intersection of sunlight and dew-spotted leaves, the unique timbre of my mother's voice as she heckled the gardener, the phone ringing (my grandmother calling again to ask what we were having for breakfast). The rustle of newspaper pages as my father dawdled over coffee and pretended to know how to distinguish between chromatic descent and a standard harmonic progression.
Now I structure my Sundays around an early breakfast in Sinangag Express where I almost always order tapsilog, which I stopped eating for some time, back when I first lived in Manila. I can't remember why -- might be because I thought it had gone out of fashion in the city or something since Jollibee, for example, only used to sell pancakes and hotdog meals. And then I started noticing the increasing number of 'tapsis' in Manila and how people would invariably eat all the variations of the menu for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Tapsilog--and the associated 'silogs'--has become something like a fastfood staple, no longer just the iconic Filipino almusal.
In any case , I don't suppose I could be accused of eating it because it has become the fad. There's certainly an element of nostalgia -- Sinangag Express serves their tapsilog with a generous helping of delicious atchara, which inevitably reminds me of the atchara my relatives used to make. We would receive jars of atchara as gifts... I do miss it. At the same time, I have also come to realize the value of making and observing my own rituals. They're inevitably less rich than childhood traditions, which tend toward the colorful and the expansive. It's true that you learn to reduce parts of yourself to the most common denominator as you grow older. The relief of dwelling in binaries as opposed to constructing your life like an overwrought exercise in differential calculus... I've always appreciated the mathematical definition of elegance, that is, the appearance of simplicity under great difficulty. In some ways I still feel like I'm treading water after my grandparents died, but more and more, by the grace of God and the kindness of people, my feet connect with solid ground.
More touchstones: having coffee in a nearby coffeeshop, reading a book, working. Perhaps a haircut later this afternoon. A phone conversation with my parents or my siblings. Listening to music at night. The grace of being alone.
Of course when I wrote "must post a blog entry daily" back in January I really meant "in another life, maybe."
February literally sped by. Only marks of passing time: the sharp bite of the chill night air when walking home at night, the static sky of early morning to which I would ascend everyday through the steps of the pedestrian overpass. The world has turned inward for me in certain ways, but I myself have expanded.
And not just because of my newfound passion for buko halo. (But more on this later).
Today I am happy because my iPod is working again. It's a classic fourth-generation clickwheel archaism. No color, no video, none of that touchscreen thingamajig. Just 20 gig of music.
Hilariously obscure music too -- my dad bought it for me three or four years ago, when I was going through a postrock/postjazz/postacidfunk/posteverything phase. Of course now that I've reverted to form and have taken to listening again to hilariously predictable and occasionally corny music, I skip through half my playlists. Thing is, my iTunes program refuses to connect with the damn thing so I can't update it. Too much bad garage rock, I guess.
iPod mysteriously stopped functioning late last year. I tried--gently--banging it against doors and walls as suggested by frustrated users worldwide (because I was too cheap to go to a repair center). Had resigned myself to saving perhaps for a Nano, which resignation turned into serious contemplation when I found myself having to endure listening to novelty song anthologies c/o FX drivers. Not that I have anything against "Tsokolate" or "Boom Tarat Tarat" but it kind of wears on you? In the sense of inducing murderous rage.
I'd stashed the iPod in a desk drawer where I kept letters etcetera. I opened the drawer early this morning to look for a postcard from a great-aunt, when I came across the iPod. I idly flipped it on and lo and behold.
I should at least look for the USB cord.
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