cocoro

The order of things

In my spare time I'm writing a novel about a printer called Valentine Cats who finds himself stranded in a castle in Slovakia, hostage to a mad count with a fascination for puzzles and his crippled daughter, who is a bibliomaniac. When I get tired of thinking up ways to describe Chinese cryptograms, I turn to a half-finished treatise on Filipino sociological thought, which I might or might not submit for my masteral thesis. 

My aunts tell me I should get all these things published. I might, but I probably won't.  When I die, my family will find my writing in untidy heaps of papers and messily encoded text, crammed into the drawers of my study table or lurking in random folders on my computer. My only ambition is to live nicely day by day and the only talent I have ever really tried to cultivate is the ability to fulfill this ambition. It amazes my cousin Mark that I seem to know so many useless things and choose to do so little with it. 

But then I think education is something that enriches your life, not something you do things with. 

I hope that didn't sound too condescending. 

*

Last night I met with Dr. Rhod Nuncio of De La Salle University. He has written a book on digital media and technology in Filipino. While there are a lot of books about the Internet and the WWW, I don't think there has ever been a book written on the subject in Filipino, so this should be an interesting publication. It is a little dated by now and I ought to ask Dr. Nuncio to update it with more information on the social web and semantic search since we are the de facto publishers of the manuscript, which however technically belongs to De La Salle University Press.

(After DLSU Press went bankrupt due to unsound business management, Dr. Isagani Cruz took over to dissolve the properties of the Press, including manuscripts pending publication. He had the brilliant idea of farming out these manuscripts to different commercial publishers to ensure that they will still get published. I'm not sure if Vibal was simply given a selection of manuscripts or if we had a hand in choosing the titles we were assigned to publish, since I wasn't connected with the company at that time. But it probably doesn't matter, happy accidents--evidenced by the case of Dr. Nuncio--being the order of the day). 

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.

Botong Francisco

Yesterday I went to visit the family home of Carlos "Botong" Francisco--National Artist for Visual Arts and one of the greatest painters and muralists the Philippines has ever produced--in Angono, Rizal. We're doing a book on Botong under our Arte Filipino imprint, which publishes compact volumes on the lives and works of master Filipino artists.  I came to Angono with our managing editor Chris, Patrick Flores (editor of the book and noted art critic and scholar), and Danilo Reyes, who is writing the biographical essay on Botong for the book. We met Carlos Francisco II (or Totong), grandson of the artist, and Salvador Juban, his apprentice. The only son Rodolfo Francisco wasn't able to come for our scheduled appointment, but Chris hopes to interview him when he returns with a photographer this week to photograph the memorabilia, press clippings and pictures belonging to the family and to Juban.

The family home is currently under renovation. After he died, Botong's studio became something like a museum, which apparently turned into a favorite destination for teachers and school children. They didn't visit for the art, since Botong's famous murals and paintings were commissioned and so belonged to private and institutional collections. Instead they came to look at the evocative black-and-white photographs of the artist at work and at play; his collection of knives, baskets, and kulintang; photographic slides of buildings and artwork, which, according to Totong, the family used to view with an ancient slide projector; a selection of his canvas shoes and straw hats, visual accompaniments to memories of Botong taking long walks along the shore of Laguna de Bay; an easel; his favorite chair. 

When we visited yesterday, the reconstructed studio still smelled of plaster and unswept dust. The shoes were stacked haphazardly on a low-lying shelf, the photographs and kulintang propped against the wall. An old basket contained what remained of Botong's magazine clippings and correspondence. I sorted the postcards and torn photographs, trying to find some personal memento which we can include in the book. But according to Totong, most photographs of his grandfather belonged to the photographers who took them. Their own albums were empty. 

I sat for a while in Botong's chair where he used to curl up for hours on end, eyes closed and dreaming of his murals. Juban said that some critics used to accuse Botong of being lazy because he was prone to long periods of inactivity when he would do nothing but lie somnolent and unmoving, rousing himself only to watch his favorite Westerns on TV. But then, one morning, Juban would arrive in the studio to find Botong at work on his canvas, focused and intense. During those times you could not talk to him. He would barely eat and sleep; he worked as if possessed, as if he was still dreaming. I suppose that for Botong art was a constant dream, a never-ending magical vision. 

No such visions came to me while I sat, my face tilted up to the hot sunlight that streamed in through the wide windows of the studio. I remembered the gold plaque, attached to the gate leading into the house, proclaiming Botong as National Artist. He was hailed as the "poet of Angono" who, by evoking the past, also managed to make the Filipino present come alive. A self-proclaimed regional painter whose attachment to his hometown of Angono never wavered, his art embodied the universality of myth and memory. Botong created--in the words of Gus Vibal--vibrant images of "Filipino power and beauty" in an era that saw the slow and torturous collapse of a society racked by political and economic strife. But he never had any aspirations of using his art to reinvent the Philippines; he left it to the politicians and generals to chart their destructive utopias. What he did was restore to Filipinos a powerful sense of self and nationhood. He did not dream of skyscrapers, wide boulevards or well-oiled machines; he dreamed of the movements of water, the fluidity of color, the richness of flowers, the touch of hands, blood spilled transforming into the curve of a girl's smile.

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. 

Reading habits, some notes on

KEY
italic = rabbit path
bullet = goat path
sheep reads everything

reading appetite

rabbit: eats only the tasty bits
sheep: grazes only on cultivated pasture for which it has developed tastes and habits
goat: can eat anything but refuses what is not sensible or of poor quality

book-reading style

rabbit: selects books and opens pages by chance (sometimes using numerical patterns or random numbers), seeking literary style or beauty more than content, remembers intrinsic features – e.g. that something was one third of the way down a left-hand page near the middle of the book – does not follow continuous text unless the book accords with its deeper intuitions (but ignores what does not fit these)

sheep: reads every page from first to last, reading every footnote, enjoying and believing everything. Does not realize when it is being misled or manipulated, is grateful for everything and won’t venture into unfamiliar pastures unless assured by fashion or recommended by critics or by word of mouth (but it cannot take in what is original or new, nor can it change its reading habits)

goat: studies the contents list carefully, also the index, tables, and typographic indications of the structure, questioning everything – it reads and understands the book thoroughly or else rejects it quickly if initial scrutiny shows it to be worthless (or is foreign to its own ideas)

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. 

Daily readings

Le città invisibili
Italo Calvino (1972)

Le città e la memoria. 2.

All’uomo che cavalca lungamente per terreni selvatici viene desiderio d’una città. Finalmente giunge a Isidora, città dove i palazzi hanno scale a chiocciola incrostate di chiocchiole marine, dove si fabbricano a regola d’arte cannocchiali e violin, dove quando il forestiero è incerto tra due donne ne incontra sempre una terza, dove le lotte dei galli degenerano in risse sanguinose tra gli scommetitori. A tutte queste cose egli pensava quando desiderava una città. Isidora è dunque la città dei suoi sogni: con una differenza. La città sognata conteneva lui giovane; a Isidora arriva in tarde età. Nella piazza c’è il muretto dei vecchi que guardano passare la gioventù; lui è seduto in fila con loro. I desideri sono già ricordi.


Invisible Cities
tr. William Weaver (1974)
Cities & memory 2

When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city. Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the bettors. He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.

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. 

A word from our sponsors

This is where I issue standard disclaimers re: blog posts appearing weeks and months after they were first written. I blog more regularly--i.e., once a month--in a livejournal account that mostly contains tiresome digressions about movies, books, and missed meals.  But a colleague at work nags me about not blogging, when my job is mostly in digital media, so I also keep promising myself to catch up on writing. 

So there.