Yesterday afternoon a female student had walked with me after class, shielding me from the painful sun with her blue umbrella, said, “Miss, naiyak ako sa inyo class kanina. Wala pa naman ako tissue…Buti na lang si….meron.” I asked why. She said, “It was when we were talking about fathers. I never realized…” We were reading and discussing “Race With Seagulls” by Bienvenido N. Santos. He was once my Mom’s English teacher, I said to them. Strict, too, she said. You know what all your parents really want? Just for you to graduate then they can say, “Ok, we have finally done our obligation to provide you with education for the real world. Now get a job and support yourself.” But of course they don’t stop being parents. Then she said, “I don’t like reading poetry because I can’t seem to understand it and I have to keep on checking the dictionary so I just stop…But now I want to read more poetry. Are there any poetry readings I can go to?”
Last night while Joey and I walked to a restaurant in Power Plant for dinner, I saw an ad that said (paraphrased) I learned from my father not through his words but with how he lived--- Anonymous.
Just before 3 pm today I sent Twiggy a message, “The sun here is painful…I miss you.” I though about the book “The Liar’s Club”. I remembered my journey in psychology and psychiatry: survivors of sexual abuse would either become promiscuous or frigid, either way trapped by sexual fixation. And these words were once uttered a long time ago, “If your body has responded pleasurably to a sexual abuse, it’s a matter of its responding to stimuli. It didn’t mean that it was you responding, just your body.” So now you have to learn what it means when your mind says NO but your body says YES, for your mind and body to be one, so that this time you give consent. You have control your body this time: do not be enslaved by stimuli. This requires abstaining from sex or anything sexual. Lack of control is what I call the apple-bite-mentality. Advertising presented it as the “Marshmallow Test”.
One psychological thought defined “Black Hole” as a mental-emotional-physical state that takes from everyone but doesn’t give back anything. I call this “sucking”. Professor Carlos Aureus called it in one of our conversations as “vampiric energy”. I remember he asked in 2005, “You got a 1.0 in my class, right?” I laughed, “I think I got a 2.0 or 2.25.” He couldn’t believe it. I said, “Don’t worry Sir, I sure made friends with Literary Theory Since Plato by Hazard Adams.” Our textbook which I borrowed from Carljoe Javier. The so-called “blue light” emitted by a Black Hole rarely happens and if it does that means the individual has become finally conscious of what Black Hole means and he/she/it wakes up. Horace calls this consciousness “Restraint”.
Then I thought of Wednesday night in Route 196 and hearing singing with an affected –K (with an –H) of clitoris-pretend-girls--- hating how it almost dispelled the Sound that Selena gave when she sang: Flashes. Selena has the voice of an angel who gives hope even when sad. A brook. A Black Star that asks “Where are we coming to?” And she laughs at herself--- with the universe. What is distance? What keeps us apart? Zero and nothing-- and it can’t be measured. Distance.
Just after 3 pm today, I was being driven by TJ to--- where my own father had once worked--- withdraw money. I told him why he should always be kind to his two elder sisters, because they have forsaken their youth and even love to take care of us. They could have chosen not to. Then I heckled him with family memories like how he wore a skirt just after he was circumcised. Or how he liked picking flowers then to give to his teachers and how he loved his stinky hotdog abrasador.
I remember Gnomie being the one to teach him how to ride the bicycle or how as children, before he reached Grade 4, I and my baby brother would sleep beside each other. He would fall asleep reading a volume of Book of Knowledge which I would then pick up to read. I would fall asleep and wake up to my baby brother cuddling close to his Manay. Later on he would be in high school and refuse to be even hugged, refuse to answer to “Bomboy” or “Omboy”. He wanted to be called TJ, not our little brother who danced to “boom…boom…boom…”
There we saw our Ate and she said, “Kanina pa ko naghihintay dito ng taxi! What are you doing here?” I said, “Withdraw money. Samahan mo muna ko sa loob then hatid ka na namin balik sa office mo.” She didn’t know that I was getting money already from my untouchable savings, my graduate studies fund, money I have saved since I started working. She laughed when she saw me reach for the withdrawal slip because apparently I knew which was what. Next to gizmos, I’m an idiot when it comes to banking. Then I heckled her about retiring white tops and told her that she should wear more colorful tops and, Sshhh, umayos tayo, kahiya naman na sabihin nila dito na butatera mga anak ni Daddy. After which one other manager approached Ate, asked after Dad and Ma, and some other business. We couldn’t be just like everybody in that place. I shook his hand like a grown up, a pistol grip.
On the car TJ had said, “Ate, I need to take a penalty course. Shet. 8 years na pala ko sa MA!” To which Ate said, “Hah! Walang tatalo sa kin sa inyo! 10 years sa undergrad! Nagmarcha pa ko! Buntis pa yun kasama ko!” I remembered that day in 2003 in PICC. My family all clapped and cheered as Ate’s name was called and she stopped on the stage and waved her faux-diploma at us. I cried and inspired, said to myself time for me to graduate, too. She was wearing a black dress from Sari-Sari that Joey and I bought for her as a graduation gift. I was and still am so proud of my Ate who chose to stop going to school to work because we were having problems in money.
Then Ate gave me a book and said, “Eto yun textbook na pinapabili ni Yan-Yan. Grabe! Ano ba ‘to! Ayoko na mag PTA meetings and all! Ayoko na!” TJ said that he remembered Ate being the one to come up to the stage with him several times when he was still a kid. “Why was that?” TJ asked. Ate said, “Because Ma and Dad couldn’t get out of work. Ang strikto kaya sa kanila! Buti na lang kahit papaano dito sa opisina puede akong lumabas pag kailangan.” I told TJ, “Kaya nga ako iniiwan ni Ma na kila Auntie Mila eh, kasi bawal bata sa opisina nila.”
I remembered the times that I had to be the one to get my own report cards and had to forge Dad’s signature. (I was good at that, too.) And that I had to be the one to talk to Yan-Yan’s elementary teachers… This is why Ma doesn’t want us to work anywhere with “uniforms”, though she said that realistically wearing uniforms is cheaper. I like saying “fuck you” to uniforms, too.
Ate said, “Buti na lang si Biboy and PaoPao mga gustong mag-aral. Excited pa! Yun ibang mga bata ayaw.” Then TJ said, “Shet! Kailangan ko ng study habits! Wala ata ako nun eh!” I heckled, “Wala nga. Ako lang tapos si Ate and Egg ang meron sa atin eh.” It’s discipline: to sit and read and note everything.
After, as I walked around Paseo de Magallanes with TJ and Gnomie looking around for a restaurant, I saw on a board Study to remember and you forget. Study to understand and you remember--- Unknown.
On the way home just after 6 pm, I saw the Philippine National Railways train pass--- rusty, dirty, crowded---- full of passengers, some were even on top of the train cars. TJ asked, “Gusto niyong sumakay diyan?” I laughed, “Oo naman. Pati skates!” I remembered when Yan-Yan and I traveled from Sariaya to Calauag (Quezon) via railway skates on the semester break of 2000--- the towns in between were flooded from the typhoon therefore the buses couldn’t pass--- because we just wanted to go home to Naga. All the passengers of one had to get off when two railway skates meet because one needed to give way while one is carried off the rail to the side. Sometimes, they said, it’s a matter of waiting out the other skate to give way. Then there’s the danger of being rammed by a train.
I remember that it was already past 7 pm that night. We left
I laughed to TJ and Gnomie while looking at the passing train and its passengers, “Ano pa kaya itsura ng mga tao sa
Ninotchka Rosca’s first short story collection is entitled “Bitter Country and Other Stories”. Of course it has been out of print for three decades already. “Ninotchka” was the name she was called by Nick Joaquin in one of the writing workshops. She was the enfant terrible of her time: a prodigy, they said. The language in that collection was violent, Leonard Casper said, given the historical context. I found the language in some of her stories in that collection almost cryptic. Her second (and last?) short story collection is called “Monsoon Collection” published in
In the ‘70s, there was a mestiza beauty queen who went underground and joined the New People’s Army. She did that because she loved this man who loved his country. In loving, she loved her country. In loving, my own father chose not to go underground in 1972 because he said to his friend, “I have a wife and a baby daughter. I will not leave them.” He taught us in his own way to love our country. He taught me by telling me history, his stories. Like once it was past curfew and soldiers came to this bar where he was--- while everyone ran and hid, he began calmly gathering the bottles and cleaning up, pretending to be a waiter. They didn’t detain him. Funny history.
The late Senator Pepe Diokno was once detained and his family didn’t know where he was or if he was still alive. His wife had even resorted to having a séance. They were finally informed that he was alive in this camp. When some of his family members came and saw him, he had his hands behind his back, smiling. His wife had asked, “Why are you hiding your hands? Let me see! What have they done to your hands?” He kept on smiling, shaking his head, hiding his hands. Behind his back, his hands were holding his pants up because he lost so much weight that if he had let go, well…He once said to one of his sons, “Son, you do everything for the woman you love except think for her.”
On May 27 2008 at 4:17 pm: “May I?” I asked the stranger staring out the wide windows--- out from glass--- staring at this sky from this tall white building. He shook himself awake from wherever he was, said, “Yes, Ma’am” indicating a chair. I sat, listening to “Miss You” from the Ambient music in the memory card for the cellular phone, reading Gemino H. Abad’s Mapping Out Our Poetic Terrain. Again--- just like I read it before through the years. Again--- I think of erasing memory. Do those remembered want to be remembered? I am against forgetting. “If we have not, if we do not, what, in the end, have we become? And if we have not, what, in the end shall we be?” Carolyn Forché, Against Forgetting
The stranger sat, quiet. I said, pushing my journal towards him, “Excuse me, can you do something for me? Can you write what is it you’re thinking about? Nothing official, it’s personal, for me.” He took my journal---- a page offered as a gift to this stranger, to me, a stranger. He wrote: I’m thinking about what will happen to me in…I also think about why love and happiness are like the same? Why the world is too complicated for us to move on? I’m thinking about how people know how to love but not love for their country. The stranger was not a stranger after all. He was my student, he said, as I stood up when the bell rang and we both walked to enter the same classroom.
At 6:21 pm today Chinggoy had sent, It has never been a question of who forgets… because sometimes there’s a definite pain on being the only one who remembers everything. I replied that I was touched by this message and asked him what was up. He said, “Wala naman my friend. It was sent by an acquaintance and it reminded me of you.” I thanked him for sharing it and told him that it really does hurt to remember even when I try so hard to forget. He said, “I know, my friend. Ingat.”
I remember Ma’am Pacita, I remember Herbert Read’s “Definition of Art”. Introducing a lepton of my brain language:
FORM… work of art has a “good form” if it has that element which is common in all the forms of works of art and that is NATURE... We judge the form of the work art on Nature because the elementary forms which men have instinctively given to their works of art are the same as those forms which exist in nature.
These forms give rise to emotions that we normally associate with works of art --- number, symmetry, instinct, order, the compulsion to create…The forces that bring about these forms in nature will remain constant; the same forces that compel and govern us in shaping works of art: immortality, a lasting beauty. This is why Read states that “from the logic of form proceeds the emotion of beauty.”
NATURE AND ART…There are two art forms according to Read: 1) Intuitive copies of the internal structures of natural forms; and 2) deliberate application of laws derived from the structure of natural forms.
THE SUBJECTIVE ASPECT …Theodor Fechner was the first one who introduced the factor of “association” because a work of art demands the cooperation of the spectator, i.e. Empathy. Empathy, as Lipps definition modified by Read, is the discovery of the “elements of feeling in the works of art and association of these elements with his own sentiments.”
The essence of empathy lies in the already known fact that the creation and appreciation of art is colored by the mental, emotional and physical state of both the artist and let’s say the critic, if not the individual apprehending the work of art. Read states that from a scientific perspective all forms of art are legitimate expressions of a type of mental personality and our appreciation should not just be exclusive to one school of thought.
This is why in criticism we usually apply an amalgam of theories in fully appreciating the value of a work of art.
IMAGINATION…Read states that imagination is a product of organization of abstract proportions and harmonies; that to be able to embody imagination in an object, it takes order and discipline.
And once more we are returned to the order given by the natural laws of the universe. Our desire, really, according to Read, is to imitate and emulate the structural perfection of the physical universe. But since imagination rules our minds, and whether it is a question of our minds being limited or being beyond limitations of our imagination, we will never be content to simply imitate or emulate but rather to express “a world of our own; a reflection of our personality.” Originality is a product of imagination.
AESTHETIC VALUE is a question of the distinction of the art of expression from expression itself; the degree of feelings and how we express those feelings. We are searching for a standard value in distinguishing the two.
Expressionist Art deals with how an artist feels and expresses those feelings in his works of art. Those feelings, because they are expressed strongly or effectively in the works of art, are in turn felt by the one perceiving the art.
But these expressions, according to Read, do not explain the appeal that art makes not only to our sense but to our mind and imagination as well. To find out how the appeal of art works, we must expose ourselves to different types of art in order to understand how it appeals to our imagination.
One common appeal of art is that it appeals to our recognition of universal forms; those that are applications of universal laws of nature because the underlying forms and structure of each work of art is the same.
Another common appeal is the role of imagination and how its manifestation in the work of art appeals to the spectator. Read postulates that the remaining properties of art, those entailed with imagination, actually stem from some form of primordial images buried all in our collective unconscious; that it is possible that we understand these images that are the product of the imagination because they all come from the world of dreams and fantasies. This is why we understand, in some level, all that is expressed by the imagination of different artists and different works of art.
Read is very clear about this being just a supposition on his part since he considers it one of the mysteries in life.
…And then it becomes a matter of analysing and knowing what is “conscious and unconscious” or “real/fantasy/dream” collective or subjective from the perspectives of everyone under Psychoanalytic Theory in Literary Criticism, with names like Freud, Jung (who said “fuck you” to Freud), Adler (who said “fuck you” to both) and especially Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Félix Guattari who said “fuck you” to just about everyone from Freudt o following Company.
Ekphrasis: a literary description of or commentary on a visual work of art. I have observed for the past four years that there’s a method being used by some teachers in literature subjects which students like: I call it [PE]R(e)VERSE Ekphrasis wherein students of literature are made to translate or provide a commentary on a text through a visual work instead of text.
A word is sound-over-image. In just a word you can have both music and visual art. What more if you have a text that embodies one word that is embedded with all its truths? So why the hell would we limit a text to a word’s visual part? The subject is literature, and yeah, expository writing is a prerequisite. Last time I checked the latter is an essential part of the General Education Program, too. Really, how can anyone write an essay on anything regarding literature if the standard writing course is Business/Technical Writing?
My Nanay said, “…if they can see how I think through things and like the process of thinking with me, they just might do some real thinking of their own. Mataray ba ang Nanay mo?” I laughed and cheered, “Ang taray! I love it!”
In elementary Home Economics class, my teacher complained that when I sew I make the stitches too tight. Ma says the same thing about my sewing. I tried to always relax my hands then later I abandoned needle and thread and used words instead. But if people remember, nothing is random, we understand, when I say “fuck that standard,” that I can only do that much climbing down or relaxing my hands so that people will understand
---the responsibility of Academic/Freedom.
No comments:
Post a Comment