The issue besieging the leadership in this country no longer needs a backgrounder. Rather, it needs clarity and proper perspective amid the smoke of propaganda and befuddlement of the issue being belched by some politicians and sectors of the society.
There is no doubt that President Macapagal-Arroyo no longer enjoys the moral ascendancy to lead this country. Assuming that she won the presidency last 2004, her mere actuation of trying to rig the election as revealed by the ‘Gloria-gate’ tapes is enough reason for her to resign. Her resignation is the only ethical way of giving back the lost trust this country has on the highest office of the land.
A lot has been said about forming a new leadership after her. A lot has proposed ways on how the government should be by the time she steps down. These are all garbage talk.
The Constitution has an installed crisis resolution program for an event such as this. The Constitution, obviously, gives the mandate to the Vice President to succeed if the President resigns. It is very clear.
Yet, we hear the Opposition, muddling the crisis even more by acting like a pack of wolves by trying to dictate who among on their likings should come next into power. They are nothing but power-hungry low-lifes that deserves the stake so as they could be burn.
The Opposition might have done the good deed of exposing the ‘Gloria-gate’ tapes, but choosing or dictating who should lead next, as if the revelation mandated them to be in power, is an absolute delusion on their part, a delusion that the likes of Rep. Escudero has been indulging himself throughout this crisis.
When asked whether Vice President Noli De Castro can succeed in the event of the President’s resignation, this holier-than-thou pretender brazenly replied: ‘Hindi pa sa amin nagpapakilala si Noli de Castro… We still don’t know his kind of government…etc.” What strong stomach he got there, eh. Rep. Escudero manifesting his presumptuousness to reveal the tail of power-lust demon he and his colleagues has within them.
Of course, this argument rest on the assumption that the President will resign. Something that she strongly denies she would ever do (as of press time). She thinks she can survive this storm with imperturbable indifference to the clamor of the people. Yet, can’t she see that her office has been buried without salvation by the catastrophic avalanche brought by the thunder of her own ‘lapse of judgment’?
This writer hopes that self-sacrifice wins in the heart of the President soon, and gives her the courage to let go. I hope it happens before this crisis is forced to end in an ugly resolution with the absolute certainty that it would be on the expense of the Filipinos in general.
Note: This should have been posted in the midst of the crisis besieging the Arroyo regime. Though it might sound passe since the Arroyo has survived the onslaught of calls for her resignation over the Gloria-gate tapes, this writer thinks it is still revelant on the issue of her damaged moral ascendancy over the Filipino people.
Thursday, July 28, 2005
Saturday, July 23, 2005
The Adventure of the Man They Called Mariano Torres
It took a light tap on his shoulder accompanied by a haste greeting the discovery of how he was called: Mariano Torres. The name had an awkward impact on him. It reverberated in his ears with the difficulty of associating it with his person, like a placard with too weak adhesive it dangled from his being like a fake belligerent attribution.
His confusion began after less than an hour of marvelous experience of observing the changing of the sky’s hue during the last faltering glow of the sun as it crashed with thundering silence at the horizon. He stared at it with astonished eyes of an adolescent boy terrorized by ecstasy of the anatomy of the opposite sex slowly being stripped of garments before him. He would crane his neck in half-circle, from one end toward the opposite, to contain in one sweep the whole vista of heaven in outburst of colors, only to let out a deep sigh of resignation in the end due to his inability to put logic into it. And, probably, due also on his failure to contain it maddening beauty.
It was only when dusk had set in and the slithering tentacles of darkness crawled with inevitable certainty when he snapped back to his senses, as if waking from a wet dream. He realized he had been squatting on a breakwater, his feet dangling over the rhythmic onslaught of waves against the boulders beneath him. He looked with squinting confused eyes at the boulevard that ran behind him. His head throbbed in pain, like that of a drunkard’s hangover, not knowing what he was doing here or of what circumstances precipitated his being here, void of notion of the preceding night’s eventuality after drowning in the deluge of alcohol.
He must have sleepwalked, he thought. And behind his trail left the debris of memory of his personal history. Though this thought passed like a wisp of wind that had no shadow thus he was more concern on the possibility of having sleepwalked. So his reaction took the form an idiot looking again at his feet to check whether he had his shoes on. He had, as he found out; a black leather pair polished and glinting above the splash of waves. But the realization only aggravated the issue.
He must be dreaming then, so the reason for the indefiniteness of everything within and around him. He paused to think, as if to catch his breath, then stared at his hand that loomed before him, concrete and palpable. It did not change into a misshapen cactus or into an iguana or into wriggling worms. The hand remained the same; the knuckles were covered by dark coarse skin and the nails harboring specks of damped dust. He knew then that success at staring at it was enough proof that he was wide-awake. The remaining recourse for him then, in this hour of complete confusion, was to pray and rely for a providential appararition of an entity to lay the answers on the puzzle right on his lap.
As he deliberated on these issues, the street lamps had been switched on. The throng of promenaders that moved in perpetual flux along the boulevard had grown thicker by then.
He stood up with a blind effort. Standing amid the stream of strollers, he let himself drift without definite destination, guided only by the vague desperate hope of stumbling into lucidity.
He noticed most promenaders ambled without preoccupied thoughts and malicious intentions about the others. They were engulfed in their own stray thoughts caressed by the evening’s gentle sea breeze. Overwhelmed, he walked with adapting their behavior, a tactic he employed to hide the tremor of perturbation of his soul.
Then a group of young people walked towards his direction. They were laughing in their shared camaraderie replete with guffaws that nobody paid attention to except him.
Contrary to the others with whom he found sympathy in the solitude of their universes, his affinity as promenader to this group was a murderous enmity. Their naïve cheerfulness struck him with the monstrosity of alienation, though the venom of this reaction diminished as he observed that a company or a small group joined most of the strollers, something that he failed to notice earlier. It became obvious to him since those who were involved in casual chitchat on the benches along the side of the pavement knew each other and those who strolled had someone whom they talk to as they ambled forward.
A profound terrifying comprehension with so strong its tectonic shifting in his thoughts stirred his guts. The wisdom popped up in him like an introduction to some complex mathematical equation reserved to a handful of reclusive physicists: promenaders almost always knew someone here. The realization freed that he was able to paddle to the surface of his ocean of solipsistic solitude and breathe the fresh idea that it would not be far that someone among this throng knew him.
All he had to do was to make himself as visible as possible to most strollers. He followed this scheme by keeping a modest distance from the strollers in front of him, good enough for those who walked towards his direction to have a good look at him. Though he also had to ignore the push of those behind him who urged 0him to walk faster.
And there he walked for the first time content and happy with a purpose. He would look farther ahead of him, gauging as by what side he could come across the more strollers. He would veer to the left, then center, then right as he walked on. He would scan the faces of the strollers in an attempt to get an eye contact.
He had covered a good distance yet he seemed to have become invisible the more he tried to be noticed. Gaining no favorable result, he was prompted to walk on his toes to create an elevation so that his head would protrude above the crowd and could be seen from any vantage point.
He reached the end of the boulevard, where beyond led to the city proper and the perpetual noise of insomniac establishments and where from this point the promenaders would turned back to continue their walk. Frustrated by his failure, he went on with his walk toward the direction he had come from. Resigned, he was more concerned now on reaching clarity through pondering than being chanced by someone who knew him. He walked with stoop head, contrary to his earlier posture of putting his face before every strollers he crossed path with.
He had been mesmerized by his empty meditation that only led his thoughts groping in the depths of incomprehension on his journey within when somebody patted him from behind. He turned, enough to catch the passing feature of a lanky man, lugging a leather brief case under his arm, who made a quick greetings to him: “Mariano Torres, it’s already time to be with your family.”
He could have had stalled the man, trap him in a short conversation, or make a rejoinder that had the necessity of a reply revealing added information about him. But the man strode in hurried wide steps, and dissolved in the flow of the crowd before him.
Left again in his solitude, he repeated the name by which he had been addressed. Several times the name came out loud from his mouth and heard by passing strollers who would look at him, certain that they had been called and mistaken for another person, and would contort their faces at him in surprise. But he was no longer aware of these. His focus of was the name. For him, it had the nature of a stranger who was introduced to him for the first time. The name adhered to him as misrepresentation of who he thought he really was, and too difficult to fit to himself.
He might as well have had the same confused reaction and contorted faces of the strollers who thought they had been called for somebody. But he could not afford to do that. For, simultaneously it was during these repetitions when the void of not knowing how he was called opened its hole before him. Each invocation supplied the pieces of a dormant puzzle he was not aware of until he got the glimpse of the wide picture.
Then a voice speaking to him cut his thoughts. The crowd of promenaders materialized again from the haze of his vision.
“Mariano, I’m glad to see you here.”
He looked at the person talking to him. It was a lady protected from the cold breeze by a blazer, and panting with suppressed heaving of her bosom.
“It’s the same way for me,” he pretended.
“How’s your family,” the lady said.
“They’re fine.”
“Anyway, I wish I could talk to you longer,” the lady said. “But I have to rush back to the office. I forgot something.”
Then the lady hopped onward opposite his direction, and left on her trail the clatter of her footsteps and a fading remark:
“Just give my regards to Mercedes and the rest of your family.”
The weight of how the world knew him as who was reinforced with greater certainty now. Its gravity rested on the quiet pronouncement that everything that had something to do with the name Mariano Torres all winded down as attribution and definition of him. The name was him.
He could not escape from it now, what more with the sly contraption of fate that he had a family. The first one mentioned he had. And now, the second validated it. “But where are they?” he asked.
He continued his walk clad now with an identity and definition.
By then he was used already to the smell of the liquid taste of ocean salt carried by the breeze along the boulevard. As he progressed, the throng started to thin out, until he reached the part where the brick pavement was cut by the penumbra of a grassy field, and where farther ahead, the expanse of the sea lay with its steady waves in the dark, deep and mysterious.
It was only then when he noticed the cluster of houses across the road. There must have gone the man who greeted him earlier, he thought. Probably, the fine lady lived there too. He crossed the road in dazed intention and motive, for he did not know where to go from here.
He followed without pattern the maze-liked streets, looking furtively at windows that revealed the well-lit interior of houses and the souls residing inside. Along narrow alleys, he listened to the voices carried by the wind that seeped through thin ply-boards walls. On several occasions, he found himself facing dead-ends, only to retreat in embarrassment to where he had entered, avoiding the eyes of loiterers to parry attentions.
During this time of aimless wanderings, each street’s and alley’s blind corner presented the horror of finding himself on the precipice of the end of the earth; pitch black in darkness and bottomless in depth.
Then, someone hollered out his name as he trudged along another unfamiliar street. He found the origin of the voice coming from the bungalow house he had just passed. A woman on the veranda was waving her hand at him. He forced a smile loaded with the intuition that she could be his wife and drew toward her. But the impression lasted until she uttered her rejoinder to his soft statement: “Mercedes.”
“Mercedes is not here,” the woman said. “But mother will be happy to see you.”
The woman then grabbed his arm and led him inside the house where an old, fat woman, hunched like a meditating Buddha on the sofa, welcomed him with a smile of surprise. He tried to reciprocate it with cordiality as genuine as he could display, without the tinge of hesitation that restricted his movements into nervous jerks. Around the heavy presence of the old, fat woman a young man and a girl occupied the space offered by the couch and divan. They looked up from the television set and greeted him.
When the old fat woman stretched her flabby arms at him, he stooped toward her in suspended animation, as if for a century, not knowing whether a hug or a kiss was necessary, but the latter had captured her by then in her arms and supplanted a kiss on his cheek, and told him, as if he were a boy:
“Where the hell have you been? You’re soiled and stinking like a street dog.”
“He’s looking for Mercedes, Mama,” said the woman who had led him.
“Did you two had a fight?” asked the old fat woman.
“No,” he said as the only honest reply he could think of.
The old fat woman said then to the woman:
“Give your brother some fresh clothes. And could someone call Mercedes and tell that Mariano is here.”
to be continued.......
Note: This is partial of the story I'm trying to write now. I hope stray blogger in this site would appreciate it.
His confusion began after less than an hour of marvelous experience of observing the changing of the sky’s hue during the last faltering glow of the sun as it crashed with thundering silence at the horizon. He stared at it with astonished eyes of an adolescent boy terrorized by ecstasy of the anatomy of the opposite sex slowly being stripped of garments before him. He would crane his neck in half-circle, from one end toward the opposite, to contain in one sweep the whole vista of heaven in outburst of colors, only to let out a deep sigh of resignation in the end due to his inability to put logic into it. And, probably, due also on his failure to contain it maddening beauty.
It was only when dusk had set in and the slithering tentacles of darkness crawled with inevitable certainty when he snapped back to his senses, as if waking from a wet dream. He realized he had been squatting on a breakwater, his feet dangling over the rhythmic onslaught of waves against the boulders beneath him. He looked with squinting confused eyes at the boulevard that ran behind him. His head throbbed in pain, like that of a drunkard’s hangover, not knowing what he was doing here or of what circumstances precipitated his being here, void of notion of the preceding night’s eventuality after drowning in the deluge of alcohol.
He must have sleepwalked, he thought. And behind his trail left the debris of memory of his personal history. Though this thought passed like a wisp of wind that had no shadow thus he was more concern on the possibility of having sleepwalked. So his reaction took the form an idiot looking again at his feet to check whether he had his shoes on. He had, as he found out; a black leather pair polished and glinting above the splash of waves. But the realization only aggravated the issue.
He must be dreaming then, so the reason for the indefiniteness of everything within and around him. He paused to think, as if to catch his breath, then stared at his hand that loomed before him, concrete and palpable. It did not change into a misshapen cactus or into an iguana or into wriggling worms. The hand remained the same; the knuckles were covered by dark coarse skin and the nails harboring specks of damped dust. He knew then that success at staring at it was enough proof that he was wide-awake. The remaining recourse for him then, in this hour of complete confusion, was to pray and rely for a providential appararition of an entity to lay the answers on the puzzle right on his lap.
As he deliberated on these issues, the street lamps had been switched on. The throng of promenaders that moved in perpetual flux along the boulevard had grown thicker by then.
He stood up with a blind effort. Standing amid the stream of strollers, he let himself drift without definite destination, guided only by the vague desperate hope of stumbling into lucidity.
He noticed most promenaders ambled without preoccupied thoughts and malicious intentions about the others. They were engulfed in their own stray thoughts caressed by the evening’s gentle sea breeze. Overwhelmed, he walked with adapting their behavior, a tactic he employed to hide the tremor of perturbation of his soul.
Then a group of young people walked towards his direction. They were laughing in their shared camaraderie replete with guffaws that nobody paid attention to except him.
Contrary to the others with whom he found sympathy in the solitude of their universes, his affinity as promenader to this group was a murderous enmity. Their naïve cheerfulness struck him with the monstrosity of alienation, though the venom of this reaction diminished as he observed that a company or a small group joined most of the strollers, something that he failed to notice earlier. It became obvious to him since those who were involved in casual chitchat on the benches along the side of the pavement knew each other and those who strolled had someone whom they talk to as they ambled forward.
A profound terrifying comprehension with so strong its tectonic shifting in his thoughts stirred his guts. The wisdom popped up in him like an introduction to some complex mathematical equation reserved to a handful of reclusive physicists: promenaders almost always knew someone here. The realization freed that he was able to paddle to the surface of his ocean of solipsistic solitude and breathe the fresh idea that it would not be far that someone among this throng knew him.
All he had to do was to make himself as visible as possible to most strollers. He followed this scheme by keeping a modest distance from the strollers in front of him, good enough for those who walked towards his direction to have a good look at him. Though he also had to ignore the push of those behind him who urged 0him to walk faster.
And there he walked for the first time content and happy with a purpose. He would look farther ahead of him, gauging as by what side he could come across the more strollers. He would veer to the left, then center, then right as he walked on. He would scan the faces of the strollers in an attempt to get an eye contact.
He had covered a good distance yet he seemed to have become invisible the more he tried to be noticed. Gaining no favorable result, he was prompted to walk on his toes to create an elevation so that his head would protrude above the crowd and could be seen from any vantage point.
He reached the end of the boulevard, where beyond led to the city proper and the perpetual noise of insomniac establishments and where from this point the promenaders would turned back to continue their walk. Frustrated by his failure, he went on with his walk toward the direction he had come from. Resigned, he was more concerned now on reaching clarity through pondering than being chanced by someone who knew him. He walked with stoop head, contrary to his earlier posture of putting his face before every strollers he crossed path with.
He had been mesmerized by his empty meditation that only led his thoughts groping in the depths of incomprehension on his journey within when somebody patted him from behind. He turned, enough to catch the passing feature of a lanky man, lugging a leather brief case under his arm, who made a quick greetings to him: “Mariano Torres, it’s already time to be with your family.”
He could have had stalled the man, trap him in a short conversation, or make a rejoinder that had the necessity of a reply revealing added information about him. But the man strode in hurried wide steps, and dissolved in the flow of the crowd before him.
Left again in his solitude, he repeated the name by which he had been addressed. Several times the name came out loud from his mouth and heard by passing strollers who would look at him, certain that they had been called and mistaken for another person, and would contort their faces at him in surprise. But he was no longer aware of these. His focus of was the name. For him, it had the nature of a stranger who was introduced to him for the first time. The name adhered to him as misrepresentation of who he thought he really was, and too difficult to fit to himself.
He might as well have had the same confused reaction and contorted faces of the strollers who thought they had been called for somebody. But he could not afford to do that. For, simultaneously it was during these repetitions when the void of not knowing how he was called opened its hole before him. Each invocation supplied the pieces of a dormant puzzle he was not aware of until he got the glimpse of the wide picture.
Then a voice speaking to him cut his thoughts. The crowd of promenaders materialized again from the haze of his vision.
“Mariano, I’m glad to see you here.”
He looked at the person talking to him. It was a lady protected from the cold breeze by a blazer, and panting with suppressed heaving of her bosom.
“It’s the same way for me,” he pretended.
“How’s your family,” the lady said.
“They’re fine.”
“Anyway, I wish I could talk to you longer,” the lady said. “But I have to rush back to the office. I forgot something.”
Then the lady hopped onward opposite his direction, and left on her trail the clatter of her footsteps and a fading remark:
“Just give my regards to Mercedes and the rest of your family.”
The weight of how the world knew him as who was reinforced with greater certainty now. Its gravity rested on the quiet pronouncement that everything that had something to do with the name Mariano Torres all winded down as attribution and definition of him. The name was him.
He could not escape from it now, what more with the sly contraption of fate that he had a family. The first one mentioned he had. And now, the second validated it. “But where are they?” he asked.
He continued his walk clad now with an identity and definition.
By then he was used already to the smell of the liquid taste of ocean salt carried by the breeze along the boulevard. As he progressed, the throng started to thin out, until he reached the part where the brick pavement was cut by the penumbra of a grassy field, and where farther ahead, the expanse of the sea lay with its steady waves in the dark, deep and mysterious.
It was only then when he noticed the cluster of houses across the road. There must have gone the man who greeted him earlier, he thought. Probably, the fine lady lived there too. He crossed the road in dazed intention and motive, for he did not know where to go from here.
He followed without pattern the maze-liked streets, looking furtively at windows that revealed the well-lit interior of houses and the souls residing inside. Along narrow alleys, he listened to the voices carried by the wind that seeped through thin ply-boards walls. On several occasions, he found himself facing dead-ends, only to retreat in embarrassment to where he had entered, avoiding the eyes of loiterers to parry attentions.
During this time of aimless wanderings, each street’s and alley’s blind corner presented the horror of finding himself on the precipice of the end of the earth; pitch black in darkness and bottomless in depth.
Then, someone hollered out his name as he trudged along another unfamiliar street. He found the origin of the voice coming from the bungalow house he had just passed. A woman on the veranda was waving her hand at him. He forced a smile loaded with the intuition that she could be his wife and drew toward her. But the impression lasted until she uttered her rejoinder to his soft statement: “Mercedes.”
“Mercedes is not here,” the woman said. “But mother will be happy to see you.”
The woman then grabbed his arm and led him inside the house where an old, fat woman, hunched like a meditating Buddha on the sofa, welcomed him with a smile of surprise. He tried to reciprocate it with cordiality as genuine as he could display, without the tinge of hesitation that restricted his movements into nervous jerks. Around the heavy presence of the old, fat woman a young man and a girl occupied the space offered by the couch and divan. They looked up from the television set and greeted him.
When the old fat woman stretched her flabby arms at him, he stooped toward her in suspended animation, as if for a century, not knowing whether a hug or a kiss was necessary, but the latter had captured her by then in her arms and supplanted a kiss on his cheek, and told him, as if he were a boy:
“Where the hell have you been? You’re soiled and stinking like a street dog.”
“He’s looking for Mercedes, Mama,” said the woman who had led him.
“Did you two had a fight?” asked the old fat woman.
“No,” he said as the only honest reply he could think of.
The old fat woman said then to the woman:
“Give your brother some fresh clothes. And could someone call Mercedes and tell that Mariano is here.”
to be continued.......
Note: This is partial of the story I'm trying to write now. I hope stray blogger in this site would appreciate it.
Monday, June 13, 2005
Underneath the Tectonic Movements as I Plod Writing a Story
Begin. For the first time in years (yes, after writing several mediocre story stories in 2000) I have the terrifying ecstatic feeling of knowing how to write a short story. Even the way it should be written came into my head like a path well-trodden and learned and studied. During the marathon sessions of writing the rough draft of the story for more than four, probably five, my wind still last as if I could go on for hours still. I just have the road well mapped out. My goal, which I repeat to myself as I write, is to write as simple and as clear as possible. Even when the time for the first rewriting session came, I know what to do with the text.... Drat! .... more next time......
Sunday, June 12, 2005
Busy Days
For those who once in a while visit this blogsite, I want to apologize for the infrequent posting I've been making here. I've been preoccupied for a couple of weeks now writing a short story which I think has the potential of being published if written right. Though I feel I know exactly how to write the story and the rewriting that I have to employ on it. So bear with this blogger for the lull in posting peripatetic thoughts here.
The Fifth Estate
I chanced to watch a CNN special about the phenomenon of blogging sneaking into the frontline of infomation dissemination and I was happy to call myself part of the Fifth Estate.
Friday, June 03, 2005
Today is Sunday
For the old man who sits on the bench along the well-lighted corridor, nothing appeals him than watch the thin hand of the wall clock recounting the passage of seconds in this somewhat flat morning. He puckers his lips and munches with his toothless gums the profound idea that seems to have struck him, though he would shrug his head and squint his eyes as negative validation of its importance.
But what he plays in his head is of no great consequence to the world or to the public that passes along the corridor this early morning. Nobody in fact gives the old man a merit of their attention. They must have seen him sitting on the bench, but nothing than a familiar, dull ornamental sight of no value.
So the old man sits still on the bench with his own alcoholic thoughts, drunk with ideas that he himself could no longer instigate the power to put order in the stream of chaos in his reason. A concrete structured philosophy is totally absent, leaving behind his peripatetic mind an invisible trail. Though the old man could feel sporadic pain and twitches in his guts, as he anticipates the millisecond interval of the clock until it ticks, concluding that a second has elapsed.
With difficulty, he tries to navigate his thoughts to separate the days, those that have past and that of this day, yet he cannot distinguish them with difference. For a long time his mind plods on the miasma of identical events, the same well-lighted lenght of the corridor, the white walls, and faces, that only heightens the pang of pain of his confusion.
Nevertheless, a vague realization, like that of a man who wakes up from a dream that he could not define with concrete shape, that what he searches for is the tacit sign that today is a different day, or for the simple act ofr naming it, that he can tell with certainty whawt day is today.
The old man has been still in that position, staring with animal attention at the wall clock, when he catches the cool, feminine voice of the nurse inside the station, bearing in its message the only clue he finds out as what he has been searching for all this time. He hears the nurse tell the doctor on duty that Father Almanzares will arrive late because the good priest would have to drop by first at the sixth floor where one of his relatives had been rushed late last night because of a stroke.
The creases on the old man's countenance grow deeper caused by an electrifying excitement, his aura of destituteness turns into that of a genius who suddenly discovers a resolution and answer to the question he has pursued for a lifetime.
Then the old man stands up, closes his white robe, ties it in a hurry and runs towards the first ward at the end of the corridor, careful that his steps, as his slippers land on the floor, not to create noise, a clown's comical gait with the impression of keeping a great surprise he is about to bestow and reveal to his audience.
As the old man stands at the door of the first ward, where inside several patients fight in their dreams their own solipsism and personal demons, he yells with gusto and glee:
"Today is Sunday. Mass at ten." Then he proceeds to the next ward hollering the same sentence repeatedly.
A nurse cuts the old man's round, pacifies him, explaining to him that he needs to be quiet because the tenants inside the wards are still asleep. But the old man cannot contain his enthusiasm. He looks at the nurse and says to her: "Today is Sunday. Mass at ten," as if the fact is the most marvelous discovery he has ever found. And for the long time that the old man can recall, this is the first time that he felt an absolute happiness.
But what he plays in his head is of no great consequence to the world or to the public that passes along the corridor this early morning. Nobody in fact gives the old man a merit of their attention. They must have seen him sitting on the bench, but nothing than a familiar, dull ornamental sight of no value.
So the old man sits still on the bench with his own alcoholic thoughts, drunk with ideas that he himself could no longer instigate the power to put order in the stream of chaos in his reason. A concrete structured philosophy is totally absent, leaving behind his peripatetic mind an invisible trail. Though the old man could feel sporadic pain and twitches in his guts, as he anticipates the millisecond interval of the clock until it ticks, concluding that a second has elapsed.
With difficulty, he tries to navigate his thoughts to separate the days, those that have past and that of this day, yet he cannot distinguish them with difference. For a long time his mind plods on the miasma of identical events, the same well-lighted lenght of the corridor, the white walls, and faces, that only heightens the pang of pain of his confusion.
Nevertheless, a vague realization, like that of a man who wakes up from a dream that he could not define with concrete shape, that what he searches for is the tacit sign that today is a different day, or for the simple act ofr naming it, that he can tell with certainty whawt day is today.
The old man has been still in that position, staring with animal attention at the wall clock, when he catches the cool, feminine voice of the nurse inside the station, bearing in its message the only clue he finds out as what he has been searching for all this time. He hears the nurse tell the doctor on duty that Father Almanzares will arrive late because the good priest would have to drop by first at the sixth floor where one of his relatives had been rushed late last night because of a stroke.
The creases on the old man's countenance grow deeper caused by an electrifying excitement, his aura of destituteness turns into that of a genius who suddenly discovers a resolution and answer to the question he has pursued for a lifetime.
Then the old man stands up, closes his white robe, ties it in a hurry and runs towards the first ward at the end of the corridor, careful that his steps, as his slippers land on the floor, not to create noise, a clown's comical gait with the impression of keeping a great surprise he is about to bestow and reveal to his audience.
As the old man stands at the door of the first ward, where inside several patients fight in their dreams their own solipsism and personal demons, he yells with gusto and glee:
"Today is Sunday. Mass at ten." Then he proceeds to the next ward hollering the same sentence repeatedly.
A nurse cuts the old man's round, pacifies him, explaining to him that he needs to be quiet because the tenants inside the wards are still asleep. But the old man cannot contain his enthusiasm. He looks at the nurse and says to her: "Today is Sunday. Mass at ten," as if the fact is the most marvelous discovery he has ever found. And for the long time that the old man can recall, this is the first time that he felt an absolute happiness.
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
A Short Essay
Of what I could gather from my elders as to how was I during my early years as a baby, they are in unison in describing me as a wailer. Inay, my grandmother as I used to call her, would pacify me by lugging me at her side, catching me by her hips, yet I still would wail incessantly as if I had seen a ghost or the small universe I perceived around me were a chaotic phantom irritating my mood. Though the earliest memory I could rummage pertaining to my childhood was my quiet attempt to distinguish which among the pair of rubber slippers in front of me corresponded to my right and left foot.
Unknowingly, these opposite qualities of my younger years would merge to define and mold me as to what I would want myself to be. Probably, the first time I wailed was not for the reason that my lampin soaked in urine made me uncomfortable, but my pristine effort to narrate the story I had dreamt of. While the silence I practiced learning how to wear my slippers foretold of the virtue I would need in order to pursue my goal of self-actualization.
Still the perception of a chaotic universe around me prevails. It remains unchanged by time, though instead of tacit wailings brought by this overwhelming observation, the need to put an order and form to this so as to appease my senses has pushed me to grab a pen and there on the blank sheet of paper I would attempt to construct an ordered universe through words, by which as a baby I wailed due to my inability to perform the task. It is during those first tries that occurred the formation of my dreams.
Though the initial concrete steps I made happened years ago during my grade-school years when instead of staring at the idiot box, like the rest of my family, I would slouch in a corner and devour reading The Reader’s Digest, illustrated Gospel books, and the book Science in Everyday Living.
These efforts, unfortunately, would come to a grinding halt when I reached my secondary schooling, putting more importance on gaining an actual experience on my immediate world by hanging out most of the time with my school buddies.
Tracing the path that I used to tread would only happen during college days. Though by that time, the previous four years that had been wasted wantonly took a heavy toll on my ability to deliver on what I should by then had learned to do: write.
It was a humbling experience then to see my contemporaries composing several pages of essays and articles while I miserably struggled to avoid getting stuck with my first sentence. Like the quiet tot I used to be then, silently discerning which is which among the pair of slippers belonged to what foot, I played low-profile, diligent and with the determination of ten bulls reading contemporary works of master storytellers like those from Latin America who grow dinosaurs from iguanas.
Now, a decade after I left the university, the education continues, excruciatingly slow at some point in time but not as slow as a snail in tranquilizers. That path is rough and a challenging one which I expected from the very start.
Nevertheless, my wailings has metamorphosed into a decent reconstruction of the universe around me with deft combination of words. The wailing I only have to do now is how to find someone who would be willing to pay me work on something I love to do.
Unknowingly, these opposite qualities of my younger years would merge to define and mold me as to what I would want myself to be. Probably, the first time I wailed was not for the reason that my lampin soaked in urine made me uncomfortable, but my pristine effort to narrate the story I had dreamt of. While the silence I practiced learning how to wear my slippers foretold of the virtue I would need in order to pursue my goal of self-actualization.
Still the perception of a chaotic universe around me prevails. It remains unchanged by time, though instead of tacit wailings brought by this overwhelming observation, the need to put an order and form to this so as to appease my senses has pushed me to grab a pen and there on the blank sheet of paper I would attempt to construct an ordered universe through words, by which as a baby I wailed due to my inability to perform the task. It is during those first tries that occurred the formation of my dreams.
Though the initial concrete steps I made happened years ago during my grade-school years when instead of staring at the idiot box, like the rest of my family, I would slouch in a corner and devour reading The Reader’s Digest, illustrated Gospel books, and the book Science in Everyday Living.
These efforts, unfortunately, would come to a grinding halt when I reached my secondary schooling, putting more importance on gaining an actual experience on my immediate world by hanging out most of the time with my school buddies.
Tracing the path that I used to tread would only happen during college days. Though by that time, the previous four years that had been wasted wantonly took a heavy toll on my ability to deliver on what I should by then had learned to do: write.
It was a humbling experience then to see my contemporaries composing several pages of essays and articles while I miserably struggled to avoid getting stuck with my first sentence. Like the quiet tot I used to be then, silently discerning which is which among the pair of slippers belonged to what foot, I played low-profile, diligent and with the determination of ten bulls reading contemporary works of master storytellers like those from Latin America who grow dinosaurs from iguanas.
Now, a decade after I left the university, the education continues, excruciatingly slow at some point in time but not as slow as a snail in tranquilizers. That path is rough and a challenging one which I expected from the very start.
Nevertheless, my wailings has metamorphosed into a decent reconstruction of the universe around me with deft combination of words. The wailing I only have to do now is how to find someone who would be willing to pay me work on something I love to do.
Friday, May 20, 2005
A Short Unfinished Autobiography of a Writer in Oblivion
The day I realized I wanted to be a writer, the ember of this ambition continuously burns since then, steadily casting a reddish glow in the depths of my soul. It was then that I decided loitering in the streets, hanging out to kill time with friends whose only vision of the future was an alien world they could not define with their notion of perpetual present, had to end. The circumstances called for a hermetic life, dedicated on reading books and writing the whole day. I saw no other path leading toward the life I knew destined for me other than this.
I was in the middle of my college studies then. I would spend most of my time browsing and scanning the books on the shelves of Humanity Section of our library and would read for hours. And usually during the afternoons, I hung around with writers and poets classmates in the campus field, talking about books, stories, writers and about life until the sky changed hues from psychedelic orange to dark blue and the guards had to tell us that the campus was already closed.
My best buddies Alex Capiz and Emmanuel Edu, who shocked our innocent and devout Catholic classmates with his introduction of himself during our first day in class with his audacious pronouncement that he was not a religious person with a religious name, helped me see what fate had destined of what I should be. Alex, as a brotherly act, taught me the lesson of investing in books, an inevitable part of pursuing what the future had stored for us as wannabe writers. They introduced me to the best and basic writers one ought to read: James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges and other slew of masters in literature.
So, it was James Joyce Dubliners that I would devour in solitude, dissecting and studying the narrative mechanisms of his prose. Then came the powerful, simple prose of Hemingway overwhelming me. Though years later, when the English language remained a monster I could not tame, I spotted the cause of the infantilization of my dream short of killing the individual writer in me; it was the wrong way how to work as an apprentice under the tutelage of Hemingway. There hangs a thin line in knowing the distinction between a teacher that would address your needs from the one that could hurt you in the end.
I failed to notice that Hemingway knocked me out in my attempt to assume my fate. Hemingway is the lone writer who can send every writer of this modern time straight on the canvas during the first round. It would take several years before I could shake the beatings that I received and spar again, and undo the wrong lessons I learned.
I should have had taken a serious look on my deficiency at its first apparition so I could have had avoided the trap I walked into when Hemingway overwhelmed me with his prose. When I uttered “I also want to won” in fighting gesture to equal the feat Alex achieved in winning the top prize of Ustetika, University of Santo Tomas’ university-wide literary competition, I should by then realized that basic English grammar was on the frontline of tasks I ought to work on.
I consider this my first failure as a writer. The assumption that I was already a writer by mere wanting to be one but not taking the responsibility that the language with which I would use as the vehicle for my work was as foreign as what Chinese language is to me started the history of my writerly journey straight to the Dark Age.
The exorcism of Hemingway’s ghost from my fledging writing wisdom happened with my introduction to the works of Thomas Pynchon, and later of Italo Calvino and the Beat prose of Jack Kerouac.
The stories I wrote after my acquaintance with these writers, though mediocre and peppered with literary flaws, seemed to have opened the reservoir of creative juice I had been trying to control, and in a way set loose the rein that tied my narrative voice, freeing it to become gregarious, free-flowing, experimental and inhibited.
When I realized I wanted to be a writer, I barely knew how to write, or pour into the blank sheet of paper my thoughts.
I remember during those early days when I struggled learning how to write when I would spend long time staring at the first unfinished sentence, stuck and stammering and groping how to continue. Those days were also trying times to stay awake and avoid succumbing to the languor creeping from my feet and calves upward as the lethargy of intense staring at the white sheet of paper hypnotized me.
Several years later, with nothing to show as a proof that I had become the writer I wanted to be, I stood among young people like myself discussing during that time community organization in our place when I looked passed them, into the darkness of the evening and tried to denounce that I wanted to be one. The illusion of becoming a writer was a product of my association with those who wanted to be one, I said to myself.
A void suddenly swirled centrifugally in my chest, consuming the meaning and purpose of everything around me. I muttered: “So, what I am now?”
Then there came the quick realization, more fix and surer than before, concrete and the only thing I knew with absolute certainty. This is no more an illusion, I said to myself. There is only one thing I know what I want to be. And it is to become a writer.
I was in the middle of my college studies then. I would spend most of my time browsing and scanning the books on the shelves of Humanity Section of our library and would read for hours. And usually during the afternoons, I hung around with writers and poets classmates in the campus field, talking about books, stories, writers and about life until the sky changed hues from psychedelic orange to dark blue and the guards had to tell us that the campus was already closed.
My best buddies Alex Capiz and Emmanuel Edu, who shocked our innocent and devout Catholic classmates with his introduction of himself during our first day in class with his audacious pronouncement that he was not a religious person with a religious name, helped me see what fate had destined of what I should be. Alex, as a brotherly act, taught me the lesson of investing in books, an inevitable part of pursuing what the future had stored for us as wannabe writers. They introduced me to the best and basic writers one ought to read: James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges and other slew of masters in literature.
So, it was James Joyce Dubliners that I would devour in solitude, dissecting and studying the narrative mechanisms of his prose. Then came the powerful, simple prose of Hemingway overwhelming me. Though years later, when the English language remained a monster I could not tame, I spotted the cause of the infantilization of my dream short of killing the individual writer in me; it was the wrong way how to work as an apprentice under the tutelage of Hemingway. There hangs a thin line in knowing the distinction between a teacher that would address your needs from the one that could hurt you in the end.
I failed to notice that Hemingway knocked me out in my attempt to assume my fate. Hemingway is the lone writer who can send every writer of this modern time straight on the canvas during the first round. It would take several years before I could shake the beatings that I received and spar again, and undo the wrong lessons I learned.
I should have had taken a serious look on my deficiency at its first apparition so I could have had avoided the trap I walked into when Hemingway overwhelmed me with his prose. When I uttered “I also want to won” in fighting gesture to equal the feat Alex achieved in winning the top prize of Ustetika, University of Santo Tomas’ university-wide literary competition, I should by then realized that basic English grammar was on the frontline of tasks I ought to work on.
I consider this my first failure as a writer. The assumption that I was already a writer by mere wanting to be one but not taking the responsibility that the language with which I would use as the vehicle for my work was as foreign as what Chinese language is to me started the history of my writerly journey straight to the Dark Age.
The exorcism of Hemingway’s ghost from my fledging writing wisdom happened with my introduction to the works of Thomas Pynchon, and later of Italo Calvino and the Beat prose of Jack Kerouac.
The stories I wrote after my acquaintance with these writers, though mediocre and peppered with literary flaws, seemed to have opened the reservoir of creative juice I had been trying to control, and in a way set loose the rein that tied my narrative voice, freeing it to become gregarious, free-flowing, experimental and inhibited.
When I realized I wanted to be a writer, I barely knew how to write, or pour into the blank sheet of paper my thoughts.
I remember during those early days when I struggled learning how to write when I would spend long time staring at the first unfinished sentence, stuck and stammering and groping how to continue. Those days were also trying times to stay awake and avoid succumbing to the languor creeping from my feet and calves upward as the lethargy of intense staring at the white sheet of paper hypnotized me.
Several years later, with nothing to show as a proof that I had become the writer I wanted to be, I stood among young people like myself discussing during that time community organization in our place when I looked passed them, into the darkness of the evening and tried to denounce that I wanted to be one. The illusion of becoming a writer was a product of my association with those who wanted to be one, I said to myself.
A void suddenly swirled centrifugally in my chest, consuming the meaning and purpose of everything around me. I muttered: “So, what I am now?”
Then there came the quick realization, more fix and surer than before, concrete and the only thing I knew with absolute certainty. This is no more an illusion, I said to myself. There is only one thing I know what I want to be. And it is to become a writer.
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
Civilize My Writing
There are times when I feel that my writing style does not conform to the 'civilized' form of writing as general readers define what is good writing and interesting to read. One possible reason is I write without any consideration whether the reader gets my point or not.
Most of my writing, or the posts I make here in my blog, are labyrinth ramblings of a soul trying to find his voice. So if a roaming blogger landed on the pages of my blog and read several posts I made here, he might find them uninteresting, vague, even to the point that he might say to himself: What the hell is he talking about ?
My posts are usually notes (lately written haphazardly due to the lack of time to concentrate, in spite of a good whole free day enough for me to compose a decent pseudo-article.) That is the problem when you have lots of time in your hands; it gives you more reason to procrastinate and delay the things you ought to do.
Well, this degradation on my writing can be also attributed to the fact that I have no computer in the house, and the place I use to write in long hand (the next door beside our house) is under renovation. I would not say that I succumbed to the blows of circumstances, but I'll just consider myself reeling from its blows. It is hard when circumstances, plus my being a natural lazy person, push me to pass the days just jotting down notes and desperately call them 'writings.'
One of these days, I will sit again in front of a blank sheet of paper, take my time, write decently, clear and true as I can, then alot a good time for rewriting, then, finally, finally, I can then call it a good writing.
For now, these little notes would be enough.
Most of my writing, or the posts I make here in my blog, are labyrinth ramblings of a soul trying to find his voice. So if a roaming blogger landed on the pages of my blog and read several posts I made here, he might find them uninteresting, vague, even to the point that he might say to himself: What the hell is he talking about ?
My posts are usually notes (lately written haphazardly due to the lack of time to concentrate, in spite of a good whole free day enough for me to compose a decent pseudo-article.) That is the problem when you have lots of time in your hands; it gives you more reason to procrastinate and delay the things you ought to do.
Well, this degradation on my writing can be also attributed to the fact that I have no computer in the house, and the place I use to write in long hand (the next door beside our house) is under renovation. I would not say that I succumbed to the blows of circumstances, but I'll just consider myself reeling from its blows. It is hard when circumstances, plus my being a natural lazy person, push me to pass the days just jotting down notes and desperately call them 'writings.'
One of these days, I will sit again in front of a blank sheet of paper, take my time, write decently, clear and true as I can, then alot a good time for rewriting, then, finally, finally, I can then call it a good writing.
For now, these little notes would be enough.
Notes
What if you struggle in oblivion, trying to interpret the world according to the color of lens of your perception? When you talk to the people around you, they cannot understand the things that you say or you sense that they have no idea what it is that you are trying to relay. Nobody gets you. You see a different world. Even if you and them live in the same neighborhood, it is as if you’re from a different galaxy, light years apart.
What is more difficult when you are in a struggle to something sensible and nobody appreciate it?
Yet, as I think now, it is not important when you are in the early part of your struggle to be noticed by the world. Or it is important that they promptly understand you. For everything that you will say, if you knew it is the truest of what you see, the time will come when they will be clear.
And it is during this time when the world will notice you. It is also during this time that they will notice that everything that you have said is something they would have had in thoughts, something that is true as if it came from them.
The only difference is you are the one who took the time to look at these things they ignored. And they falsely call you talented and gifted.
Thinking
How do you know if you’re still thinking right? How can you say you’re drowning in your own world, reading the world like a newspaper so intent and close that your face kisses the pages and the black ink looms larger and a blur and drowning you?
Logical check and balance in our pursuit of reality:
1) Challenge your views by talking to the people around you. They may have a good insight of what is the real or better world.
2) Do something and stop staring at the nothingness, sitting on your ass all day. Swim to the surface, probably you’re drowning.
* * * * *
Sometimes, there is one question that repeatedly bugs me: Why do I write this way? Why can’t I civilized my writing?
What is more difficult when you are in a struggle to something sensible and nobody appreciate it?
Yet, as I think now, it is not important when you are in the early part of your struggle to be noticed by the world. Or it is important that they promptly understand you. For everything that you will say, if you knew it is the truest of what you see, the time will come when they will be clear.
And it is during this time when the world will notice you. It is also during this time that they will notice that everything that you have said is something they would have had in thoughts, something that is true as if it came from them.
The only difference is you are the one who took the time to look at these things they ignored. And they falsely call you talented and gifted.
Thinking
How do you know if you’re still thinking right? How can you say you’re drowning in your own world, reading the world like a newspaper so intent and close that your face kisses the pages and the black ink looms larger and a blur and drowning you?
Logical check and balance in our pursuit of reality:
1) Challenge your views by talking to the people around you. They may have a good insight of what is the real or better world.
2) Do something and stop staring at the nothingness, sitting on your ass all day. Swim to the surface, probably you’re drowning.
* * * * *
Sometimes, there is one question that repeatedly bugs me: Why do I write this way? Why can’t I civilized my writing?
Friday, May 13, 2005
Seaching for the Book: Live to Tell the Tale
I could not help myself to slap my forehead at what stupidity I've done this early evening at Powerbooks. I was planning to buy the recent published autobiography of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. What stuck in my mind as the title of the book was Live to Tell the Tale.
Now, roaming around the bookstore, resisting the short-cut to approach the sales personnels, I looked for the book by myself. I was also killing time and browsing for other interesting book so roaming aimslessly around was a nice thing to do.
But I soon found myself asking a sales personnel for an assistance. I told myself that I would roam around after my purchase. And then, as the readers expect what happened, the sales personnel had a hard time searching their database for the book. Drat! How could the sales personnel find the book when the title was wrong.
After half an hour, standing at the counter and the poor sales personnel twisting her search style and even calling the nearby branch for that book, I was told that probably the book was already sold out.
"Would you want to make a reservation, sir," the sales personnel told me.
"No, it's okay," I replied. "I would try National Bookstore."
Then, there it happened. The discovery of what a bummer I did there in Powerbooks.
In National Bookstore, I was still saying to the sales ladies that I was looking for the book of Gabriel Garcia Marquez Live to Tell the Tale.
I only got to my right senses when a sales lady handed me the book and reading the title, I could not help but shrugged. It was Living to Tell the Tale.
I paid for the book, grinning from ear to ear at what an obvious lapse of memory I had in recalling the title of the book.
Now, roaming around the bookstore, resisting the short-cut to approach the sales personnels, I looked for the book by myself. I was also killing time and browsing for other interesting book so roaming aimslessly around was a nice thing to do.
But I soon found myself asking a sales personnel for an assistance. I told myself that I would roam around after my purchase. And then, as the readers expect what happened, the sales personnel had a hard time searching their database for the book. Drat! How could the sales personnel find the book when the title was wrong.
After half an hour, standing at the counter and the poor sales personnel twisting her search style and even calling the nearby branch for that book, I was told that probably the book was already sold out.
"Would you want to make a reservation, sir," the sales personnel told me.
"No, it's okay," I replied. "I would try National Bookstore."
Then, there it happened. The discovery of what a bummer I did there in Powerbooks.
In National Bookstore, I was still saying to the sales ladies that I was looking for the book of Gabriel Garcia Marquez Live to Tell the Tale.
I only got to my right senses when a sales lady handed me the book and reading the title, I could not help but shrugged. It was Living to Tell the Tale.
I paid for the book, grinning from ear to ear at what an obvious lapse of memory I had in recalling the title of the book.
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Delivery Boy Attempting to Write
It took me several minutes to prepare the coffee, boiling first a mug of water and when it seemed hot enough, poured it into the cup. I rummaged in my piles of papers for something to write on. All bond papers had been scribbled on and I knew then that I had to get a fresh supply of papers; available in the store and I could get several pieces so I could start.
Pens and papers were ready, and yes the coffee. It was time already to go to the adjacent house and write the narration that had been playing in my head.
Then the phone rang, as I was about to get out of the house. It was a client. It was an order for cases of strong beer and pale pilsen. Promptly, I had to drop the things that I would have to do, and hurriedly put on a shirt, grabbed my cap and asked the receiver of the call where would I deliver the orders. After much fussing about the exact location of the store, I dumped the cases of beer on the service tri-bike and sort out for myself where was the store from the vague direction that was given to me. The coffee would be cold by the time I returned for sure but it did not matter.
When you have set your mind on something to do and there are distraction like errands and chores to fulfill, you just have to understand that these are necessary delays. These errands are only momentary. After fulfilling them, there would be a lull in time, enough to retrace your steps as to what your mind was weaving earlier.
So after the delivery, I bid my time again, repeating the rituals, wiping the sweat from my brows and arms. This was the time of reconstructing the narrative that flowed in my head earlier; my head searching for that glimpse of the gist of the narrative, the rhythm, the juice. A cigarette or two would do the trick, I thought.
Then, as I got myself halfway back to the path (I could already feel the narrative beginning to flow again) moseying in the house as if trying to find something, another order came in. For the second time, it did not matter again. I got a good hold of the narrative in my head and nothing could erase it.
After all the distractions, finally, I was able to sit. It was already time to pour the narrative that had been bugging me into the blank pages of the paper.
It was near noon when he woke up. He stumbled from his cot and went straight to the kitchen. He boiled a mug of water. When he saw that there were little bubbles hissing on the casserole, he poured the water into a cup and made himself a coffee. He sat on the patio in front of the house, sipping the coffee. He fished for a cigarette in his jeans and lit it. He puffed hard, feeling the smoke went into his lungs.
The street was deserted. The sun was high over the sky, cloudless. The street was blanched white by the fury of the heat. Gabo could feel his heartbeat slowed down into hard, strong throb. He would squint his eyes as he stared at the street. He had many things in his mind yet he could not focus. All he could think was nothing. For a long time he was staring at the street until he could no longer see the baked cement pavement, the quiet prefab row of houses in front of him, until what he saw and felt was the fury flowing in his veins, the actions he had formed in his mind.
His coffee had become cold and he took it in one gulped. Then he puffed harder this time. It was time, he thought. He got his cap in his room, then put on a shirt and went into the street.
The heat of the sun was singeing his arms. His face sweated. But he was oblivious to it. He clenched his knuckles and jaw, easing down the tension in his limbs. He felt his face had been soiled and wet that he had to squint, and he squinted sharper and hard. He knew that he ought to do this. He knew it was the right thing to do. It was the most right thing he had ever to do in his life.
He still could not tell what changed him. But he knew something had changed in him since last night. He had been changed no doubt about it. This is already not the story he reads from books. No amount of reading can make you tough. It may give you the insight to face Death, but it can only reach up to that point. And Gabo knew about it. As he walked under the blistering heat of the sun, he could feel he was stepping out from the books he had read about courage. This time, he could breathe the air of fear that was making his knees wobbly. Yet the only thing that made them firm were his knowledge that it was the right thing to do for him. Live on your knees, or die in your feet. He repeated this mantra like it was the truest words that he knew. It was no longer a courage that you get from impulse. This was courage coming from a deliberate will, tougher, every second ticked with the motion of the will pushing him. This was the courage that he knew all along.
He was near the end of the block, and in his mind he could see that his foe stood behind the bend, probably talking to somebody like it was any ordinary day. He knew the other had a knife tucked in his pants, ready to stab his guts. And Gabo knew he had to be ready for it. They knew when they see each other that they would have to kill each other. He could smell the trouble waiting for him around the bend. And he was ready for it.
Pens and papers were ready, and yes the coffee. It was time already to go to the adjacent house and write the narration that had been playing in my head.
Then the phone rang, as I was about to get out of the house. It was a client. It was an order for cases of strong beer and pale pilsen. Promptly, I had to drop the things that I would have to do, and hurriedly put on a shirt, grabbed my cap and asked the receiver of the call where would I deliver the orders. After much fussing about the exact location of the store, I dumped the cases of beer on the service tri-bike and sort out for myself where was the store from the vague direction that was given to me. The coffee would be cold by the time I returned for sure but it did not matter.
When you have set your mind on something to do and there are distraction like errands and chores to fulfill, you just have to understand that these are necessary delays. These errands are only momentary. After fulfilling them, there would be a lull in time, enough to retrace your steps as to what your mind was weaving earlier.
So after the delivery, I bid my time again, repeating the rituals, wiping the sweat from my brows and arms. This was the time of reconstructing the narrative that flowed in my head earlier; my head searching for that glimpse of the gist of the narrative, the rhythm, the juice. A cigarette or two would do the trick, I thought.
Then, as I got myself halfway back to the path (I could already feel the narrative beginning to flow again) moseying in the house as if trying to find something, another order came in. For the second time, it did not matter again. I got a good hold of the narrative in my head and nothing could erase it.
After all the distractions, finally, I was able to sit. It was already time to pour the narrative that had been bugging me into the blank pages of the paper.
It was near noon when he woke up. He stumbled from his cot and went straight to the kitchen. He boiled a mug of water. When he saw that there were little bubbles hissing on the casserole, he poured the water into a cup and made himself a coffee. He sat on the patio in front of the house, sipping the coffee. He fished for a cigarette in his jeans and lit it. He puffed hard, feeling the smoke went into his lungs.
The street was deserted. The sun was high over the sky, cloudless. The street was blanched white by the fury of the heat. Gabo could feel his heartbeat slowed down into hard, strong throb. He would squint his eyes as he stared at the street. He had many things in his mind yet he could not focus. All he could think was nothing. For a long time he was staring at the street until he could no longer see the baked cement pavement, the quiet prefab row of houses in front of him, until what he saw and felt was the fury flowing in his veins, the actions he had formed in his mind.
His coffee had become cold and he took it in one gulped. Then he puffed harder this time. It was time, he thought. He got his cap in his room, then put on a shirt and went into the street.
The heat of the sun was singeing his arms. His face sweated. But he was oblivious to it. He clenched his knuckles and jaw, easing down the tension in his limbs. He felt his face had been soiled and wet that he had to squint, and he squinted sharper and hard. He knew that he ought to do this. He knew it was the right thing to do. It was the most right thing he had ever to do in his life.
He still could not tell what changed him. But he knew something had changed in him since last night. He had been changed no doubt about it. This is already not the story he reads from books. No amount of reading can make you tough. It may give you the insight to face Death, but it can only reach up to that point. And Gabo knew about it. As he walked under the blistering heat of the sun, he could feel he was stepping out from the books he had read about courage. This time, he could breathe the air of fear that was making his knees wobbly. Yet the only thing that made them firm were his knowledge that it was the right thing to do for him. Live on your knees, or die in your feet. He repeated this mantra like it was the truest words that he knew. It was no longer a courage that you get from impulse. This was courage coming from a deliberate will, tougher, every second ticked with the motion of the will pushing him. This was the courage that he knew all along.
He was near the end of the block, and in his mind he could see that his foe stood behind the bend, probably talking to somebody like it was any ordinary day. He knew the other had a knife tucked in his pants, ready to stab his guts. And Gabo knew he had to be ready for it. They knew when they see each other that they would have to kill each other. He could smell the trouble waiting for him around the bend. And he was ready for it.
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Thinking Slow
For the past two days, all he did was to sleep. It seemed he had slept for a long time and been tired so bad that he could afford to slept all that time. He had been awake only for several hours then yet it seemed he was still asleep during that time that he concluded that he had been asleep all those times. He had been thinking hard prior before he slept, thinking so hard and so fast he felt he had been running to keep abreast with what he was thinking and how he thought that he felt his mind was about to blow, or if not, he would start running with only his jockey on out in his room into the living room or maybe into the street, begging everybody to make him stop thinking. He had wanted to stop thinking so when he was able to sleep two days ago, he slept continuously even if there were times when he was awake to light a cigarette and smoke and had a good drag. Now, he is awake and thinking, though he thinks clear and slow now and can keep abreast with his thoughts that it feels fine. It feels fine to think clear and slow. It is a good feeling.
Sunday, May 01, 2005
Hard Way to Love
You try to be cool but to no avail. Unknowingly you are cool when you least know it. You are cool when you strut in the street caring nothing about the world. You are cool when you light your cigarette without care, just thinking about having a drag and staring at nothingness, past the world around you because your mind is somewhere; you care about nothing, you are detached and nothing can hurt you.
You are invisible. Nothing binds you to something. You are tied not to a single soul; everybody is just a face, a name, a character to you that exists as mere subject of your observation. You watch them and that is it; they cannot reach you.
Everything you do is for the kick of doing it. You are studying, you tell yourself as you grin your way out of unscrupulous acts and violence. It is as if you were shielded by this mindset from getting killed, shot or stabbed, or from dying. You grin and smirk because you always get out intact, with physical bruises, yet still spiritually intact.
You care nothing about your women. There are there within reach. You are tied not to a single soul, do you remember? What the hell if they cried because of you. They are just women craving for your attention because they see that you are cool, that you have potentials, and you say a lot of crap about life, about the real life that you think you know a lot about. When something wrong happens, you tell them that you just gave and let them live the love story they endeared themselves. “It’s all in your mind, honey.”
Then suddenly, you lose your cool, sign that you begin now to care and you will get hurt. Indeed, you are already hurt, somebody has penetrated your shield; you are bind unconsciously to somebody. Now you see how she had had let herself fall from the heaven of innocence, how she had had fought her way to reach you.
Now you are wrecked. You are hurt and could feel the pain. You are wrecked in the marrow of your soul. Your angel of innocence has swept down into the maw of the monster that you are a part of, and you saw how her soul beaten up, her pretty, innocent face muddied to know your world.
And now you are wrecked; wrecked and in pain. You light your cigarette with trembling hands. Each drag intensifies the depth of pain you are going through.
Then, finally, you cry.
And you know from then on that you are bind to somebody; that you are no longer cool, that you can get hurt because you care, that you no longer just see to observe but to feel.
And it is Love.
You are invisible. Nothing binds you to something. You are tied not to a single soul; everybody is just a face, a name, a character to you that exists as mere subject of your observation. You watch them and that is it; they cannot reach you.
Everything you do is for the kick of doing it. You are studying, you tell yourself as you grin your way out of unscrupulous acts and violence. It is as if you were shielded by this mindset from getting killed, shot or stabbed, or from dying. You grin and smirk because you always get out intact, with physical bruises, yet still spiritually intact.
You care nothing about your women. There are there within reach. You are tied not to a single soul, do you remember? What the hell if they cried because of you. They are just women craving for your attention because they see that you are cool, that you have potentials, and you say a lot of crap about life, about the real life that you think you know a lot about. When something wrong happens, you tell them that you just gave and let them live the love story they endeared themselves. “It’s all in your mind, honey.”
Then suddenly, you lose your cool, sign that you begin now to care and you will get hurt. Indeed, you are already hurt, somebody has penetrated your shield; you are bind unconsciously to somebody. Now you see how she had had let herself fall from the heaven of innocence, how she had had fought her way to reach you.
Now you are wrecked. You are hurt and could feel the pain. You are wrecked in the marrow of your soul. Your angel of innocence has swept down into the maw of the monster that you are a part of, and you saw how her soul beaten up, her pretty, innocent face muddied to know your world.
And now you are wrecked; wrecked and in pain. You light your cigarette with trembling hands. Each drag intensifies the depth of pain you are going through.
Then, finally, you cry.
And you know from then on that you are bind to somebody; that you are no longer cool, that you can get hurt because you care, that you no longer just see to observe but to feel.
And it is Love.
Thursday, April 28, 2005
Basic Logistic on a Personal Journey
If I would go on a personal journey and had to take a good look at the books that lined the shelves in my room and pick among them those that would be part of the personal logistics packed in my bag, I knew that I ought to write about them. I knew too that I would write about them either in the gazebo in Legaspi Village Park, or under the shadow of the trees in the lawn of Redemptorist Church, or in the stuffy Periodical Section of the National Library smelling the musty several-decade-old newspapers and magazines, or anywhere in the metropolis where I could sit and comfortably write. I knew I just have to write about them if ever I would.
First is M. Scott Peck’s Road Less Traveled, a book I stumbled upon when a monk friend lend it to me when I ran from home more than a decade ago, pondering now that learning about and from it must be the sole purpose why I had chosen to run to them past over mountains and seas toward the South. I now have my own copy, courtesy of my girlfriend, lil feather, who returned all the books (RLT included) and stuffs I gave to her as gifts when I tried to break up with her, so there would be no valid reason now to seek their generosity. The circumstances is different now: I would not run away as a rebel youth unknowledgeable of the real world as I used to be then, but simply would leave the comfort of my parents house to be the grown man that I ought to be.
M. Scott Peck aptly says the painful truth in the first sentence of the book: Life is Difficult. Indeed, nothing can be truer than that; “a great truth, one of the greatest truths,” he adds. Knowing about this bit of wisdom can calm the agitation of the soul. This is how life is, boy. No bed of roses, as the worn-out cliché goes.
This book is accompanied by Scott Peck’s two more works: The Road Less Traveled and Beyond and People of the Lie.
These three books would form as the frontline triumvirate in my journey as basic logistics as clothing, crackers, and candies (they have glucose and can make you last for sometime without food) would as I sneaked out of the house into the unknowns of my journey. They are invaluable companions to keep my eyes keen on different maps of reality with their wisdom culled from mystics, bards, musicians, artists, and conglomerate of gurus from various religions that Scott Peck learned along from his experience at poking at the contemporary human psyche and life.
Another book that would be included in the pack but sadly had to be returned to its owner, Pi, my senior in college, and also to reduce the weight that I would have to lug around, is Grace D. Chong’s Gifts of Grace Book 2.
There is no other book that I have read that skinned the layer of superficial and ordinary events to expose what marvelous grace they are when seen with the right insight. It was as if Chong could see the hands of Grace everywhere: in the simple call “Auntie,” in the desperate and failure of pregnancy, the silent patience of a spinster, the practical jokes of a sibling, the sheer single-mindedness of her son, a client with relentless pursuit for perfection. Even the commercialized slogan “Just do it!” rightfully comes back to its ancient owner Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings, to set up the unwavering human spirit to be bold, undaunted, willful, and win the fight. And it might be winning the fight of my life in the street as it would have been my case.
Then there is my paperback The Essential Hemingway, constant companion on important journeys. How does he say it in Nick Adams stories? “You have to be tough.” Or from The Snows of Kilimanjaro: “He could beat anything, he thought, because nothing could hurt him if he did not care.” Well said. Very well said.
If the thugs whom I would chance to cross path as I stay in the streets of metropolis would try to rob or maul me, I would put their faces in with the book, follow-up with an upper-cut under their chins then a turning round-house in their guts. They could get me bruised, but not my spirit. “After all, what can they do to you?… Worst one can do is kill you.”
Then what could be a better accompaniment to Hemingway’s hard, physical reality, an antithesis to his subscription with the world as you see it in one dimensional ‘the sun is the sun, the sea is the sea,’ but Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan: Lessons of Don Juan. “I don’t care what you see… How you feel is the important issue.” Hemingway from the short story The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber: “We all take a beating everyday, you know, one way or another” to Castaneda from the mouth of Don Juan: “What injures the spirit is having someone always on your back, beating you, telling you what to do and what not to do.” What could be a better combination than that?
Journey to Ixtlan is a sad anthropological book. Amid the laughter of Don Juan Matus comically mocking the writer Carlos Castaneda at his obvious puzzlement to his statements, there throbs a melancholy beat in the heart of the don, infinitely sad and lonely, in a journey without end. And aren’t we all lonely in our personal journeys, clinging to whatever we could hold on to, a palliatative to the sadness within us?
Nevertheless, the book has an effect of a conjurer’s trick; opening worlds within the world before us, marvelous and amazing, virtually giving off an aftertaste of peyote to the spirit. Reading the book numerous times, feeling the weirdness of the narrative of Castaneda, there is no other way to see the world deeper than this.
And like the worthy enemy mentioned in the book – an enemy I choose to chase – it is wrestling me now and would throw me past faraway mountains and deserts into the concrete jungle only to find back my way home again. Though I knew, like Don Juan, that there would be no way to get back home. The place and the house might be there, but something has changed that make them alien.
I would be in a journey anytime from now. And these books would be my companions as I stave off loneliness, keep the spirit intact and make me breathe in the vast desert littered by metal and concrete, hoping to find one day the soul of my existence and rightful niche in this world.
Note: This essay is my entry in Philippine Star 'My Favorite Book' contest. Hope to see it published anytime soon from now.
First is M. Scott Peck’s Road Less Traveled, a book I stumbled upon when a monk friend lend it to me when I ran from home more than a decade ago, pondering now that learning about and from it must be the sole purpose why I had chosen to run to them past over mountains and seas toward the South. I now have my own copy, courtesy of my girlfriend, lil feather, who returned all the books (RLT included) and stuffs I gave to her as gifts when I tried to break up with her, so there would be no valid reason now to seek their generosity. The circumstances is different now: I would not run away as a rebel youth unknowledgeable of the real world as I used to be then, but simply would leave the comfort of my parents house to be the grown man that I ought to be.
M. Scott Peck aptly says the painful truth in the first sentence of the book: Life is Difficult. Indeed, nothing can be truer than that; “a great truth, one of the greatest truths,” he adds. Knowing about this bit of wisdom can calm the agitation of the soul. This is how life is, boy. No bed of roses, as the worn-out cliché goes.
This book is accompanied by Scott Peck’s two more works: The Road Less Traveled and Beyond and People of the Lie.
These three books would form as the frontline triumvirate in my journey as basic logistics as clothing, crackers, and candies (they have glucose and can make you last for sometime without food) would as I sneaked out of the house into the unknowns of my journey. They are invaluable companions to keep my eyes keen on different maps of reality with their wisdom culled from mystics, bards, musicians, artists, and conglomerate of gurus from various religions that Scott Peck learned along from his experience at poking at the contemporary human psyche and life.
Another book that would be included in the pack but sadly had to be returned to its owner, Pi, my senior in college, and also to reduce the weight that I would have to lug around, is Grace D. Chong’s Gifts of Grace Book 2.
There is no other book that I have read that skinned the layer of superficial and ordinary events to expose what marvelous grace they are when seen with the right insight. It was as if Chong could see the hands of Grace everywhere: in the simple call “Auntie,” in the desperate and failure of pregnancy, the silent patience of a spinster, the practical jokes of a sibling, the sheer single-mindedness of her son, a client with relentless pursuit for perfection. Even the commercialized slogan “Just do it!” rightfully comes back to its ancient owner Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings, to set up the unwavering human spirit to be bold, undaunted, willful, and win the fight. And it might be winning the fight of my life in the street as it would have been my case.
Then there is my paperback The Essential Hemingway, constant companion on important journeys. How does he say it in Nick Adams stories? “You have to be tough.” Or from The Snows of Kilimanjaro: “He could beat anything, he thought, because nothing could hurt him if he did not care.” Well said. Very well said.
If the thugs whom I would chance to cross path as I stay in the streets of metropolis would try to rob or maul me, I would put their faces in with the book, follow-up with an upper-cut under their chins then a turning round-house in their guts. They could get me bruised, but not my spirit. “After all, what can they do to you?… Worst one can do is kill you.”
Then what could be a better accompaniment to Hemingway’s hard, physical reality, an antithesis to his subscription with the world as you see it in one dimensional ‘the sun is the sun, the sea is the sea,’ but Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan: Lessons of Don Juan. “I don’t care what you see… How you feel is the important issue.” Hemingway from the short story The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber: “We all take a beating everyday, you know, one way or another” to Castaneda from the mouth of Don Juan: “What injures the spirit is having someone always on your back, beating you, telling you what to do and what not to do.” What could be a better combination than that?
Journey to Ixtlan is a sad anthropological book. Amid the laughter of Don Juan Matus comically mocking the writer Carlos Castaneda at his obvious puzzlement to his statements, there throbs a melancholy beat in the heart of the don, infinitely sad and lonely, in a journey without end. And aren’t we all lonely in our personal journeys, clinging to whatever we could hold on to, a palliatative to the sadness within us?
Nevertheless, the book has an effect of a conjurer’s trick; opening worlds within the world before us, marvelous and amazing, virtually giving off an aftertaste of peyote to the spirit. Reading the book numerous times, feeling the weirdness of the narrative of Castaneda, there is no other way to see the world deeper than this.
And like the worthy enemy mentioned in the book – an enemy I choose to chase – it is wrestling me now and would throw me past faraway mountains and deserts into the concrete jungle only to find back my way home again. Though I knew, like Don Juan, that there would be no way to get back home. The place and the house might be there, but something has changed that make them alien.
I would be in a journey anytime from now. And these books would be my companions as I stave off loneliness, keep the spirit intact and make me breathe in the vast desert littered by metal and concrete, hoping to find one day the soul of my existence and rightful niche in this world.
Note: This essay is my entry in Philippine Star 'My Favorite Book' contest. Hope to see it published anytime soon from now.
Sunday, April 24, 2005
The End
He reached the south gate just in time to see the strange van, dark blue and heavily tinted, about to veer in the mix of the flux of vehicles along the main road. He followed it, three cars in between to avoid suspicion that it was being followed. But he sensed that it knew it was being followed, that it knew it was supposed to move as if it were not being followed and he to act as he knew he did not know that it knew it was being followed. He felt everything from the beginning, from the moment he heard of the van that it was a theatrical performance, where everybody was leading toward the two parties knew beforehand. He had felt this situation before but could not point on anything specific. A déjà vu, he thought. He followed the van as it circled its way around the metropolis ; along EDSA and the boulevard, engulfed in the din of automobiles. Once they even stopped in the same gas station to get a fill. The van finished first but waited at the corner for him and then they resumed their mock chase.
When the van reached the Libertad market, it dropped a passenger who walked briskly along the deserted side street. This is it, Edgardo thought. He pulled over beside a cheap record bar that was about to close. The Chinese owner looked behind as his two sons pulled the shutters down and the scene brought to Edgardo a pain in the prostate he could not understand. The man entered the market alley. Edgardo fished for a cigarette from his back pocket and lit it, then crossed the asphalted street. He entered the market and saw the man trudging along the aisles, zigzagging between closed and darkened stalls. Then the man slipped out at the back of the market. Edgardo found it led to a narrow street crowded by urchins and planked by a beehive of shanties. There was a wake going on, and beside the cheap coffin, the gambling table was thronged with bettors. He caught a glimpse of the man vanished into a street. He accelerated his steps. The street was a dark deserted, bordered by walls with the lamppost at the end gave it light. Edgardo knew the end of it converged with the main street, and knew he had to accost the man here or else he would lose him. He yelled at the man to stop or he would shoot. The man stopped. Edgardo walked toward the man, careful as he drew closer; the faint light revealing the face of the man who was slowly turning his face at him; a face Edgardo had seen thousands of times before in the mirror, though this face was scrawny with deep eyes. The eyes told him everything; his fate, his destiny. He felt he had to flee, he had to run and escape. He backed away, toward where he had come from, and halfway through it, running, a shot rang. Edgardo felt the cold cement pavement slammed on his face; a bullet had whacked his thigh. He writhed in pain as the gun powder scalded the inside of his thigh. When he looked up, a gun muzzle was trained at him, held by the man whose face bore the answer to Edgardo’s questions. In split second, he heard the gunfire, saw the sudden flash of light, then total darkness.
When the van reached the Libertad market, it dropped a passenger who walked briskly along the deserted side street. This is it, Edgardo thought. He pulled over beside a cheap record bar that was about to close. The Chinese owner looked behind as his two sons pulled the shutters down and the scene brought to Edgardo a pain in the prostate he could not understand. The man entered the market alley. Edgardo fished for a cigarette from his back pocket and lit it, then crossed the asphalted street. He entered the market and saw the man trudging along the aisles, zigzagging between closed and darkened stalls. Then the man slipped out at the back of the market. Edgardo found it led to a narrow street crowded by urchins and planked by a beehive of shanties. There was a wake going on, and beside the cheap coffin, the gambling table was thronged with bettors. He caught a glimpse of the man vanished into a street. He accelerated his steps. The street was a dark deserted, bordered by walls with the lamppost at the end gave it light. Edgardo knew the end of it converged with the main street, and knew he had to accost the man here or else he would lose him. He yelled at the man to stop or he would shoot. The man stopped. Edgardo walked toward the man, careful as he drew closer; the faint light revealing the face of the man who was slowly turning his face at him; a face Edgardo had seen thousands of times before in the mirror, though this face was scrawny with deep eyes. The eyes told him everything; his fate, his destiny. He felt he had to flee, he had to run and escape. He backed away, toward where he had come from, and halfway through it, running, a shot rang. Edgardo felt the cold cement pavement slammed on his face; a bullet had whacked his thigh. He writhed in pain as the gun powder scalded the inside of his thigh. When he looked up, a gun muzzle was trained at him, held by the man whose face bore the answer to Edgardo’s questions. In split second, he heard the gunfire, saw the sudden flash of light, then total darkness.
Saturday, April 09, 2005
Second Lease of Life
My time right now is short and not enough to elaborate the action, violent experience I have had several days ago, me, almost tittering on the brink of dying, or rather getting killed. There is no replacement to see Death before His eyes other than committing yourself into his scythe, through the participation of lawless scumbags that are ready to kill you without conscience or vacillation. Yet, all I could remember is to die with dignity, die with my feet standing and forsake living with kneels folded. What did Hemingway said about it? The worse that they can do to you is kill you. Well, they didn't, and living a life like a boy, boyish and always preferring peace is already over. It seems there is nothing that can daunt your spirit. You've stared at the eyes of Death and it is already like dying. This is already my second lease of life. Death no longer frightens me. I'm already ready.
Monday, April 04, 2005
No Pc, No Blog.... But There's the Net Cafe
This is the first day that I don’t have a PC at home. The routine of waking up and booting on the computer and logging on to check my mails and scribble something for my blog has changed into a mere ritual of having a mug of coffee, a couple of stick of cigarette for my nicotine dose, and staring blankly at space.
Even though the computer table in my room looks miserable without the CPU below, and my fingers feeling the urge to pound on the keyboard and yak something out, which would eventually end as a pos for my blog, everything is not lost.
Though rare it would be, I can still post something here by going to net cafes and have my slice of flitting net pleasure there.
I’m lucky that I’m in my part-time job as a programmer here in Navotas and have a free use of a computer and later on rent an access to the net so I could post this short rambling of my thoughts.
Everything is still okay.
On the sketch pad: I plan to go to my own so-called training camp in Taguig, in the house of my older brother, where there is no inhabitant most of the day. There I can continue rewriting my long due project short story.
Even though the computer table in my room looks miserable without the CPU below, and my fingers feeling the urge to pound on the keyboard and yak something out, which would eventually end as a pos for my blog, everything is not lost.
Though rare it would be, I can still post something here by going to net cafes and have my slice of flitting net pleasure there.
I’m lucky that I’m in my part-time job as a programmer here in Navotas and have a free use of a computer and later on rent an access to the net so I could post this short rambling of my thoughts.
Everything is still okay.
On the sketch pad: I plan to go to my own so-called training camp in Taguig, in the house of my older brother, where there is no inhabitant most of the day. There I can continue rewriting my long due project short story.
Sunday, April 03, 2005
Will Be Gone For a While
The time has come... my sister-in-law is taking the pc with her already... it will take some time before i can post again here...
Farewell Pope John Paul II
I was barely awake when I found myself sitting in front of the tube. The screen scrolled down a solemn prayer, and it bore with it a sad news: Pope John Paul II has past away. My eyes turned misty, and after collecting myself, said a prayer for him.
I confess that I do not consider myself a Catholic, though I was born one. Probably I've read too much books, been exposed to too much radical ideas, and had had enough of the scandals going in the Church, plus the fact that I don't subscribe to some of its doctrines, that I decided to bolt from the congregation for good. I even would casually say to people that I don't have a religion. (Am I throwing the baby with the bath water? I'll ponder about it when the right time comes.)
Yet, this news about the Pope, saddens me. I shouldn't be that affected by his departure than a knowledge that a person has just died. But I am.
The closest the Pope had come near me, was when he visited the country, 1995 I think. Though, I did not attempt to take a peek of him personally, like joining the droves of faithfuls that welcomed him here. Watching him on the tube was enough.
And, in that short hours of parading on the road, amid the excited crowd, I felt a mysterious, almost unexplainable euphoria and realization of who really was this man waving and smiling at the cheerers. Someone I heard said that his aura is the grace bestowed upon him by his office. And I could not deny it. Upon seeing him, I backtracked generations to generations of long ago until I ended up seeing Jesus Christ. It seemed the gap between the time of the Christ and the present time was dissolved. Then the obvious, but now concrete moving evidence: the Pope is the descendant of Christ for our times. He is the present shepherd for millions of souls toward God.
The Pope is gone now. The thread that connects us to Christ is momentarily cut. In spite of this, Pope John Paul II deserves a thankful prayer for his service.
May his blessed soul rest in the presence of God.
I confess that I do not consider myself a Catholic, though I was born one. Probably I've read too much books, been exposed to too much radical ideas, and had had enough of the scandals going in the Church, plus the fact that I don't subscribe to some of its doctrines, that I decided to bolt from the congregation for good. I even would casually say to people that I don't have a religion. (Am I throwing the baby with the bath water? I'll ponder about it when the right time comes.)
Yet, this news about the Pope, saddens me. I shouldn't be that affected by his departure than a knowledge that a person has just died. But I am.
The closest the Pope had come near me, was when he visited the country, 1995 I think. Though, I did not attempt to take a peek of him personally, like joining the droves of faithfuls that welcomed him here. Watching him on the tube was enough.
And, in that short hours of parading on the road, amid the excited crowd, I felt a mysterious, almost unexplainable euphoria and realization of who really was this man waving and smiling at the cheerers. Someone I heard said that his aura is the grace bestowed upon him by his office. And I could not deny it. Upon seeing him, I backtracked generations to generations of long ago until I ended up seeing Jesus Christ. It seemed the gap between the time of the Christ and the present time was dissolved. Then the obvious, but now concrete moving evidence: the Pope is the descendant of Christ for our times. He is the present shepherd for millions of souls toward God.
The Pope is gone now. The thread that connects us to Christ is momentarily cut. In spite of this, Pope John Paul II deserves a thankful prayer for his service.
May his blessed soul rest in the presence of God.
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