“The most difficult subject to teach is Values Education”--- Professor Magelende Flores, UP Diliman 2001 in English 191: Approaches to a College English Program. English 191 is also known as “How To Teach English and Literature in College” a.k.a. “The subject English teachers take in UP when they fail in the student evaluation.”
Being “Found” in Hide-and-Seek
“Charles found you.”
“Fuck,” I said then I laughed.
After three years, I’ve been “found”.
“How?” I asked.
“Google. Who has linked your name to this one? Did you know about it?”
“Yep. Only one. I let it be because he’s closest-to-my-heart and I respect his space. Besides, Charles found it because he knows my name. Will it be a problem? Do we need to cover that track?”
“I don’t think so.”
I got a recapping of web etiquette and I laughed again, “Not a problem. Yet. It’s okay. If it becomes a problem, it can be taken care of and I can simply disappear. Besides, it’s a coming-out anyway.”
The space I occupy in the space of the web has always been a known secret. People read this blog and have read the past two blogs and they know who really was/is writing. They keep that identity to themselves.
Any comment is welcome, except cursing me or anyone I love because that would just ensure that your space on-line becomes contaminated with viruses that any computer company may be in the process of buying. Or worse. [Manners, people, manners.]
And I do read and think about the comments but people prefer to give me their comments in private.
Why? Because as far as everyone else knows I have a mania for privacy and I have stalkers. Some people scoff at that but then again, you don’t have stalkers in the real world, do you? And you haven’t lived my life, have you? And nobody believes it anyway when I say “I’m a very shy person” because I’m such an “extrovert”; it’s something that makes all of us laugh.
Blogging started as an experiment: to get technophobe-me be more computer-internet-savvy. See, in my brain the computer is a glorified typewriter. After three years:
· I have working knowledge in Word--- like I can transfer a word document into a Powerpoint presentation just in two clicks—thanks to Sir Ed (who still calls me “Ma’am”) and practice.
· Still Zero knowledge in Excel—like when I was asked in one job interview, “How about Excel?” I had replied, “I had kind people (like our executive assistant and a teaching assistant) doing the Excel stuff for me.”
· And my way of fixing any gadget, like a modem or server, is to ask for a screwdriver or some tool and pound it to its double-death and say, “There! Fixed!”
· Not to mention letting laptops fly in my exasperation. If you’re the spectator and you’re into IT, it’s like watching trap-and-skeet shooting. You’ll scream “NO!” instead of “PULL!”
· And no, I don’t check my email. The SOP for me is to send me a message to tell me you sent me an Email and then someone retrieves the data for me.
· Also, I rarely write emails.
· As for blog-hopping, I read months of entries in one sitting, to track the narrative. If the narrative form has become too static (and I care for your writing), I tell the blogger in web-public or private what I think.
· It takes something special for me to comment on you and what you’ve written; much more continue to read you.
And I acquired a blogger account because there was this one blog “The Suicide Club” that had really made me interested three years ago. Since I didn’t know who was the blogger, I had to establish that relationship on-line. The blogger and I became friends in the real world since then.
He got me writing more nonfiction and he waited everyday for a new entry. And if I haven’t posted one, he would say, “Write something new already!”
That friend’s name is Easy Fagela: poet, vocalist of “Los Chupacabras” and my whacko. His blog in blogger is about songwriting. He says, “shitty magblog sa Friendster but you can find me there.” He’s also my lawyer in this country (because my lawyer, Howard Roark, is playing International Lawyer Extraordinaire in
It also was a move in the writing-chess-board to get me writing CNF. And it had slowly helped me to write CNF without fear for the past three years, helping my writing evolve and become more whole in writing. After all, writing of what you know and how you are as a person under the label of “nonfiction” takes a lot of courage.
There are ripples because of what is written and it is felt and experienced outside this space and in the real world, the “butterfly-effect” of writing.
I was afraid of what mayhem those ripples would do in my life.
In fear, I had passed off my CNF as short fiction. My short fiction thesis was 75% nonfiction; the 25% are those alterations that I wrote for the sake of verisimilitude. Professor Carlos Aureus calls this “Dramatic Fiction” but then again I don’t know if it’s a genre in Creative Nonfiction or Short Fiction.
The last story in that thesis collection is entitled “ The Joke”. It was CNF, actually. And it was about me and my friends Collins Lidua and Carljoe Javier when we talked about writing (and our theses) in that carinderia/inuman in UP Village. They got drunk with me, which I would do very time I finish writing a story. Being sloshed was the only way I could finally breathe, weep, or sleep after writing.
The “Joke” was about my joining a “my-favorite-book” contest and writing a critique so beautifully about this book that does not exist (which everyone will claim to have read and then will look for). And of course I will win it. I would give the money to Carljoe and write it under Collins’s name.
The question on the “Joke” was: Will I do it?
I didn’t. I turned it into a story.
Now, here, this: of course it’s nonfiction.
And of course, the nonfiction becomes material for everything else that was/is/will be written.
The difference between I (and people who write with the same “writing values” as me) and the other writers is that we don’t set up and set out to use people and events as fodder for our “creative” process and works.
If you’re wise enough (because you can be really smart or brilliant but just dumb to this sense) to encounter writers like that--- run away not towards! They will suck your creativity dry and you will end up not writing anything worthwhile.
I call these writers the “writing-vampires”.
These writing-vampires are certainly clever in writing but they’re the kind who would take material from the creative outside (that’s you) to fill their creative inside. It’s a one-way-meal-ticket--- they get better in writing, you don’t. In fact, it’s just not your writing vibe that gets sucked-lifeblood-dry but also your life.
The writing-vampire usually makes use of the so-called “gonad-power” i.e. sex. The writing-vampire with enough sucking-dry will be able to transform the physical to the literal but this writing will never touch the spiritual or eternal. After all, gonad-power-writing is just too base and when not transformed, it simply destroys (you, your writing vibe and your life).
Writing-vampires also can’t see themselves in the mirror. In fact, they refuse to look at themselves in the mirror and inside themselves. These are the writers who would ask you to lie when you ask them, “Do you want the truth?”
Now, think if perhaps you’re with one. If you think you’re with one, please save your writing soul and drive that stake into that karmic tie to sever the feeding. Then this excerpt from Natalya Gorbanevskaya’s “Sukhanono and other poems” will make sense:
*
Make appointments in December,
when even the lips freeze in the cold,
but how may one descend from poetry to prose
and overcome the craving of the body?
Then there are those writers I call the “writing-monads.”
In John Wright’s “Fugitives of Chaos”, Amelia says:
Logic says there must be one underlying reality, a nexus of cause and effect, by which final causes relate to mechanical causes. This is called a monad. It cannot be investigated by introspection alone, because it is not made of thought alone. It cannot be investigated by Material Science alone, because it is not only made of matter. Therefore, we cannot investigate it at all.
These are the writers you wish would be in your writing life because they are geniuses of the word and of creation. I think that the philosopher J.L. Austin was referring to them when he said that words are used to make things.
See, they can make you write better with their words and with their person(s) without molding you into their copies or puppets. Very few writers can do that and become a part of a symbiosis in creativity. After all, writers are a very lofty lot: they have a tendency to say this-is-what-it-is-because-it-says-so or this-is-how-you-do-it or I-am-God-bow-your-heads.
And some writers feel threatened when they see a young writer with potential and doing something that doesn’t subscribe to the norm: they inhibit the young writer’s creativity instead of nurturing it. For example, circa 2000, a friend from Creative Writing had approached a thesis adviser about his short story collection. The adviser said, “What is this? No one reads this.”
His thesis was a collection of short stories in the science-fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction genre. [Thankfully, my thesis adviser was Professor Emil “Mr. Sci-Fi”
And after seven years, the way that friend would tell his stories finally gets accepted and published. That friend is TJ Dimacali and his first publication will be in Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 3. [Book launch will be on December 8 in Fully Booked Serendra,
Very few writers are writing-monads, and they are geniuses [as Quentin put it] “a spirit who inspires a man to brilliance.”
Most of the writing-monads who inspired me are dead but I’m grateful to have been and continuously inspired by three living ones--- the Banzai Cat, La Luna Lo(r)ca Vda. de Juan Rulfo and Saladin Alfar. These are writers who are very generous with what they know, would make the effort to share with you what they know, and would make time to help you with your writing.
Of course, all writing-monads are very wise and they see writing-vampires, and see that the latter cannot be inspired because they take. I can give you a list of writing-vampires, if you like.
But writing-monads: I cannot write about them.
This is why they are writing-monads.
Now---
I’ve been “found”.
Still, not many people know. I still prefer to be named and linked in this space with “Lily” or whatever you would call me.
Please, no links when you name me in a blog entry.
Only the closes-to-my-heart is allowed to link me with my real name.
If I gave you my URL, that is a gift of friendship.
What you read here are not opinions.
“Opinions are like assholes, everyone has them,” Sir Boyet had once said to me.
What you read here are not judgements: judgements can be true or false.
Example of a true/false judgment: All girls wear skirts; some boys wear skirts; therefore some boys are girls.
What you read here is my space and this space extends to the real world:
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