somewhere i have never traveled. . .

I Dare You to Move

2011-07-15T12:51:00.004+08:00

“When you leave you will close the door behind you. Don’t we always? But time will make amends, to old friends.”

* * *

“Aware that my days . . . are winding down, I am encouraged by lines from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, that go, ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries.’ That tide, I am afraid, has now come for me, and I have chosen to take it ‘at the flood.’ I can only hope that with this new adventure in search of good fortune, I, like Odysseus setting sail for the fabled city of Troy, may one day— some time soon and God-willing— find myself back home to my beloved Ithaka.”

* * *

Looking out his office window, gazing towards the dull grey horizon that was Manila Bay, he wondered, what does the future have in store for me? What new things await me beyond that horizon?

He knew that there was no turning back now. He made sure that he was leaving nothing behind, not that he had very many things to hold on to. He was afraid, but he was hopeful. He knew that he was never coming back.

* * *

“… Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’

I’ve been thinking about that poem a lot lately. And I think what it says is that, while it’s tempting to play it safe, the more we’re willing to risk, the more alive we are. In the end, what we regret most are the chances we never took. And I hope that explains, at least a little, this journey on which I am about to embark. I have loved every minute with my KACL family, and all of you. For eleven years you've heard me say, ‘I’m listening.’ Well, you were listening, too. And for that I am eternally grateful. Goodnight, Seattle.”

Comfort in Your Strangeness

2011-07-01T06:26:00.010+08:00

And I wish you Sunrays and Saturdays
Perfect starry nights
Sweet dreams and moonbeams
And a love that's warm and bright
Sunrays and Saturdays
Friendship strong and true
Oceans of blue and a room with a view
To live the life you choose
"Sunrays and Saturdays," Vertical Horizon

It still creeps up on me sometimes— in the middle of doing the most mundane of tasks, like signing documents, or collating papers— that we had once promised ourselves forever. And that now, in spite of this, we are all but practially strangers. The thought confuses and amuses me: was it that we did not mean what we said, or that we just did not know what we were saying? Indeed, how fragile are the bonds that keep us connected; how ephemeral the links that keep us committed. It is as though we never really happened, like all of it was a dream, a movie, a figment of the imagination, a cruel joke.

Shaking off the feeling, though, I know, I know, that all of it was true. All of it. And all that is left now is some vague regret and half-forgotten memory of that magical, distant summer, when you were mine, and I was yours. No doubt, you made me happy (a tall order, indeed, considering the person I am). And in spite of all this strangeness, this is, perhaps for me— and perhaps for now— a comfort that is enough.

Seasons

2011-05-15T19:14:00.002+08:00

He sat in that coffee shop, near the second floor window overlooking a rotunda of trees, as the sun was setting. It was then the middle of summer, and while the shadows began to lengthen on the street below, the warmth of the afternoon still lingered in the air.

He was alone, naturally – this was his place of refuge from the bustle of the universe. The anonymity did him good, and the distance as well, as he looked down on the world below – couples taking their walks, children running after dogs, cars rounding the curve, approaching, leaving, approaching again. There was something hypnotic about it, reassuring almost, and for a moment, everything seemed to be unfolding as it should, in rhythms, in circles, in ups and in downs. He took comfort in this — in this vague yet necessary promise that life processed in cycles and seasons, and that all that was required to get on with living was some patience and perseverance to survive till the next fall.

The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors

2011-03-18T13:56:00.007+08:00

John Tierny, New York Times

The next time you’re juggling options — which friend to see, which house to buy, which career to pursue — try asking yourself this question: What would Xiang Yu do?

Xiang Yu was a Chinese general in the third century B.C. who took his troops across the Yangtze River into enemy territory and performed an experiment in decision making. He crushed his troops’ cooking pots and burned their ships.

He explained this was to focus them on moving forward — a motivational speech that was not appreciated by many of the soldiers watching their retreat option go up in flames. But General Xiang Yu would be vindicated, both on the battlefield and in the annals of social science research.

He is one of the role models in Dan Ariely’s new book, “Predictably Irrational,” an entertaining look at human foibles like the penchant for keeping too many options open. General Xiang Yu was a rare exception to the norm, a warrior who conquered by being unpredictably rational.

Most people can’t make such a painful choice, not even the students at a bastion of rationality like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Dr. Ariely is a professor of behavioral economics. In a series of experiments, hundreds of students could not bear to let their options vanish, even though it was obviously a dumb strategy (and they weren’t even asked to burn anything).

The experiments involved a game that eliminated the excuses we usually have for refusing to let go. In the real world, we can always tell ourselves that it’s good to keep options open.

You don’t even know how a camera’s burst-mode flash works, but you persuade yourself to pay for the extra feature just in case. You no longer have anything in common with someone who keeps calling you, but you hate to just zap the relationship.

Your child is exhausted from after-school soccer, ballet and Chinese lessons, but you won’t let her drop the piano lessons. They could come in handy! And who knows? Maybe they will.

In the M.I.T. experiments, the students should have known better. They played a computer game that paid real cash to look for money behind three doors on the screen. (You can play it yourself, without pay, at tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com.) After they opened a door by clicking on it, each subsequent click earned a little money, with the sum varying each time.

As each player went through the 100 allotted clicks, he could switch rooms to search for higher payoffs, but each switch used up a click to open the new door. The best strategy was to quickly check out the three rooms and settle in the one with the highest rewards.

Even after students got the hang of the game by practicing it, they were flummoxed when a new visual feature was introduced. If they stayed out of any room, its door would start shrinking and eventually disappear.

They should have ignored those disappearing doors, but the students couldn’t. They wasted so many clicks rushing back to reopen doors that their earnings dropped 15 percent. Even when the penalties for switching grew stiffer — besides losing a click, the players had to pay a cash fee — the students kept losing money by frantically keeping all their doors open.

Why were they so attached to those doors? The players, like the parents of that overscheduled piano student, would probably say they were just trying to keep future options open. But that’s not the real reason, according to Dr. Ariely and his collaborator in the experiments, Jiwoong Shin, an economist who is now at Yale.

They plumbed the players’ motivations by introducing yet another twist. This time, even if a door vanished from the screen, players could make it reappear whenever they wanted. But even when they knew it would not cost anything to make the door reappear, they still kept frantically trying to prevent doors from vanishing.

Apparently they did not care so much about maintaining flexibility in the future. What really motivated them was the desire to avoid the immediate pain of watching a door close.

“Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Dr. Ariely says. In the experiment, the price was easy to measure in lost cash. In life, the costs are less obvious — wasted time, missed opportunities. If you are afraid to drop any project at the office, you pay for it at home.

“We may work more hours at our jobs,” Dr. Ariely writes in his book, “without realizing that the childhood of our sons and daughters is slipping away. Sometimes these doors close too slowly for us to see them vanishing.”

Dr. Ariely, one of the most prolific authors in his field, does not pretend that he is above this problem himself. When he was trying to decide between job offers from M.I.T. and Stanford, he recalls, within a week or two it was clear that he and his family would be more or less equally happy in either place. But he dragged out the process for months because he became so obsessed with weighing the options.

“I’m just as workaholic and prone to errors as anyone else,” he says. “I have way too many projects, and it would probably be better for me and the academic community if I focused my efforts. But every time I have an idea or someone offers me a chance to collaborate, I hate to give it up.”

So what can be done? One answer, Dr. Ariely said, is to develop more social checks on overbooking. He points to marriage as an example: “In marriage, we create a situation where we promise ourselves not to keep options open. We close doors and announce to others we’ve closed doors.”

Or we can just try to do it on our own. Since conducting the door experiments, Dr. Ariely says, he has made a conscious effort to cancel projects and give away his ideas to colleagues. He urges the rest of us to resign from committees, prune holiday card lists, rethink hobbies and remember the lessons of door closers like Xiang Yu.

If the general’s tactics seem too crude, Dr. Ariely recommends another role model, Rhett Butler, for his supreme moment of unpredictable rationality at the end of his marriage. Scarlett, like the rest of us, can’t bear the pain of giving up an option, but Rhett recognizes the marriage’s futility and closes the door with astonishing elan. Frankly, he doesn’t give a damn.

En El Aeropuerto de Kuala Lumpur

2010-09-19T08:24:00.002+08:00

Sé que ya no debería, pero te echo de menos. Te echo de menos en los aeropuertos al azar, y grandes viajes a ciudades distantes. Echo de menos despertar a tu lado en lugares desconocidos, y sentado a tu lado mirando puestas de sol extranjeros. Echo de menos la alegría en sus ojos mientras caminamos en pequeños restaurantes escondidos y probamos la comida exótica. Y entre todos estos, y mucho más, echo de menos tu risa, y echo de menos agarrando su mano.

Sé que ya no debería, pero te echo de menos. Terriblemente. Y cada vez, estoy dividida entre “Es un error,” y “Este es el mejor.” No es ningún consuelo, y no hay respuesta, sólo este dolor sordo y la memoria de ti. Y creo que, ya que mi vuelo se llama por el anunciador:

Demasiados cuartos en demasiados espacios,
Demasiadas memorias en demasiados sitios.
Pero el mundo es amplio, y el mundo es ancho.
Hay siempre lugar que puede esconder de uno.

Algún día, voy a encontrar la salvación.

Giving Automated Elections a Chance

2009-11-30T13:52:00.002+08:00

Is the upcoming 2010 national elections another leap of faith
For the Filipino people?

When Juan dela Cruz visits his local polling precinct this May 10, 2010, he will be confronted not only with the usual chaos of election-day politics, but also with the novelty of participating in the first-ever fully automated national election in Philippine history.

17 years and over P11.2 Billion in the making, the full automation of the May 10, 2010 elections has been hailed by the government as a watershed event in our troubled democracy, as the use of Precinct-Count Optical Scan (PCOS) machines are expected to provide prompt and accurate election results while at the same time minimizing the opportunities for election fraud, including the dagdag-bawas schemes of the past. In the words of Commission on Elections (COMELEC) Chairman and former Supreme Court justice Jose A.R. Melo, “let us go onward to 2010 and God help us in this elections, because this will be our last chance to have an honest, clean and credible elections.”

The full automation of the 2010 polls, therefore, is an innovation long-coming, considering especially the antiquated voting system which has changed very little from the first general election held in the Philippines in 1907. True, refinements and safeguards have been put in place through various electoral exercises and three Constitutions. But at its core, the existing process remains, on the whole, tedious, time-consuming, and prone to fraud and manipulation. This is because the election process in the Philippines, from the casting of votes, to the canvassing of ballots, to the proclamation of winners, is essentially done by hand.

The Existing Electoral System

Voters everywhere are, of course, familiar with the procedure. After identification in official voter’s lists at designated voting precincts throughout the Philippines, the voter is given an official ballot on which to manually write the names of their chosen candidates. This often involves recalling at least twenty names, from the position of President, Vice-President, Senator, Mayor, Vice Mayor, members of the Sanggunian, congressman and party-list representative.

At the close of the voting day, all ballots in the local precincts are counted by what is known as the Board of Election Inspectors (BEI), a group of 3 public school teachers designated by law as “front-line election officers” tasked with the voting and counting of votes in their respective precincts. Counting is done by reading the individual votes aloud, with other election officials recording these votes on what is known as an Election Return (ER). When the BEI finally completes the counting of ballots, the ER, together with the ballot boxes, are sent to the city or municipal Board of Canvassers where they are manually canvassed or totaled together with the ERs from other local precincts. The results of this canvass are stated in what is known as a Certificate of Canvass (COC).

Upon completion of the municipal or city canvass, the municipal or city Board of Canvassers proclaims the winning municipal or city candidates, which include the positions for Mayor and Vice Mayor. At the same time, they transmit the completed city or municipal COCs to the provincial Board of Canvassers, for canvassing of the various canvassed votes from the municipalities and cities within the province. The provincial Board of Canvassers, in turn, prepares another COC from the municipal or city tally, but this time, for the positions of President, Vice-President, Senator, Congressmen, and other elective provincial officials.

After completing the provincial canvass, the provincial Board of Canvassers proclaims the winning candidates for positions of Congressman, Governor, Vice Governor, and other elective provincial officials, and transmits the completed provincial COC to the COMELEC and to Congress, which separately serve as the national Board of Canvassers for the positions of Senator, and President and Vice President, respectively. The COMELEC and Congress then conduct their own separate canvasses for these positions, and proclaim the winning candidates accordingly.

The Road to Automation

With this system, it is not difficult to see how election results, particularly for the positions of President and Vice President, would not only take weeks, if not months to complete, but would also be susceptible to manipulation through ER or COC substitution and dagdag-bawas. It has been observed, in fact, that while election fraud already takes place in the precinct level before the BEIs through the misreading or outright omission of votes, it is at the municipal, provincial and national canvasses where the whole-sale and drastic manipulation of election results take place. This is because it is at this level that cheating, if successfully done, would provide the most effective and certain results. This situation is compounded further by the inordinate delay between voting and proclamation, as returns are transmitted from one canvass level to the next, all by hand. This delay is precisely what some point to as the main contributing factor to election fraud.

Faced with this antiquated and fraud-ridden process, the COMELEC, under the leadership of Christian Monsod, embarked in 1992 on a program to modernize and automate Philippine elections. The COMELEC began its efforts with a survey of foreign electoral systems and proceeded with consultations with international election experts, through which it identified specific components necessary to successfully institutionalize a fully automated election framework. Among these components included the need to update existing technology and the systemization of the method of voter registration.

The COMELEC’s efforts were given legislative approval in 1995 when Congress enacted Republic Act No. 8046 which allowed the COMELEC to pilot-test an Automated Election System (AES) during the scheduled March 1996 elections in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). While COMELEC was given wide latitude to determine the details and particulars of this AES, its discretion was circumscribed within well-defined parameters which Congress required, first among which was the use of a stand alone machine that required minimum human intervention and which could generate immediate results using tangible ballots. By most standards, the pilot-testing of the AES adopted by the COMELEC for the 1996 ARMM Elections was considered by many, including the National Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL) and the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV), as a success.

Buoyed by the inroads made during this election, the COMELEC sought permission from Congress to fully automate the 1998 national polls. Congress responded with Republic Act No. 8346, which, while notable, was passed in the latter part of 1997, barely six months before the 1998 polls, because of Congressional in-fighting and lobbying from vested interets. Late though the law was, it granted the COMELEC’s modernization campaign a broader scope by authorizing the automation of not only the 1998 elections, but all subsequent national and local elections thereafter. For this purpose, the law mandated the COMELEC to purchase acceptable automated counting machines.

Because of the delayed passage of the law, however, COMELEC did not have sufficient time to prepare for the nationwide use of the automated system for the 1998 polls and even the 2001 mid-term elections.

It was not until 2003, following allegations of fraud in the bidding out of the contract for the computerization of voters’registration and voters’ list, that the COMELEC pursued automation for the 2004 elections. Armed with funds from the Office of the President, the COMELEC entered into a poll automation contract with a consortium led by Mega Pacific eSolutions, Inc. The Supreme Court eventually voided this agreement on the ground that the joint-venture company formed by Mega Pacific did not have the requisite juridical personality. The Court also found that the contract itself was grossly disadvantageous to the government, since the machines offered by Mega Pacific failed to meet the required accuracy standards, and are therefore unfit for use in any electoral exercise.

In a stinging criticism of the COMELEC, the Court said that the award of the automation contract to Mega Pacific by the COMELEC, “cast serious doubts upon the poll body’s ability and capacity to conduct automated elections.” The Court even went to the extraordinary step of prompting the office of the Ombudsman to determine whether any criminal wrongdoing was committed by government officials, including officials from the COMELEC, in the execution of the fatally defective agreement. Curiously, however, no government official or private individual was held to task for the fiasco, notwithstanding the fact that government had already paid Mega Pacific the contract price of P11.2Billion for the purchase of the machines.

Because of the mistrust generated by the whole Mega Pacific incident, nationwide poll automation was seriously placed in jeopardy. This was further aggravated by the involvement of some of the same COMELEC officials in the $329 Million National Broadband Network (NBN) project with the Chinese firm ZTE, and in the Hello Garci controversy. It was clear that COMELEC needed a serious cleaning of house, one which the government hoped would begin with the appointment of former Supreme Court Justice Jose A.R. Melo as COMELEC chairman.

Still, and notwithstanding these election scandals, Congress forged forward with Republic Act No. 9369, which amended the original automation law passed in 1995 by specifying either a paper-based optical mark reader (OMR) or a direct recording electronic (DRE) system as the designated mode of election automation. The amendatory law also required the use of the chosen automation system in at least two highly urbanized cities and two provinces each in Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao during the mid-term elections of 2007, ahead of the mandated national automation during the elections of May 2010.

Notwithstanding the amendatory law, however, COMELEC was again unable to implement any automation during the May 2007 polls, citing the now familiar lack of time and absence of sufficient funds. The COMELEC, however, was able to automate the ARMM Elections in August 2008, using both modes of election automation required by the law. Eventually, the COMELEC selected the use of the paper-based OMR system for the 2010 national elections. This paper-based system, while computerized, nonetheless uses actual paper ballots, unlike the DRE system, which dispenses with actual ballots altogether and relies instead on touch-screen technology to record the voter’s choice.

The PCOS Automated System

The PCOS machines for use in the 2010 polls are actually a species of the paper-based OMR system that functions by reading and counting the markings made by voters on paper-ballots after they are fed into the machine. Voters will no longer have to individually write the names of their chosen candidates, as requied in the present system, since voting is done by darkening spaces opposite the names of chosen candidates. The PCOS machine then stores the scanned information until, and only at the end of the specified polling period.

Upon a specific command from the BEI, results in the particular precinct are then automatically tallied by the PCOS machine, which prints out copies of the ER that reflect the names of candidates and the number of votes garnered by each. When copies of the ER are physically distributed to the legally-designated recepients, such as the COMELEC and the NAMFREL, the BEI then digitally signs and encrypts the electronic copy of the ER using a password or private key, which allow for the transmittal of the ER over wireless public network lines to the corresponding city or municipal Board of Canvassers, as well as to the COMELEC central back-up server, among others. A separate automated canvassing system collates these ERs at the municipal, city, provincial and national level, and generates corresponding COCs, similar to the existing system. What is notable, however, is that throughout the canvassing process, human intervention is brought to a minimum, and accuracy is ideally increased because of the absence of human error.

Continued Skepticism and the Optimism of the Supreme Court

Some quarters, however, remain skeptical about the technology and over-all canvassing system chosen by the COMELEC for the 2010 elections. These skeptics, whose ranks include lawyers and IT professionals, point out that the PCOS machines approved for use by the COMELEC not only lack transparency in the recording, canvassing and transmittal of votes but are also susceptible to software attacks, glitches, and other technical problems.

One of the most obvious vulnerabilities underscored by detractors is the choice of the PCOS system itself, which requires the voter to shade spaces beside candidate names, which are, in turn, scanned, tabulated, and saved by the machine. Pointing to experience abroad, some IT professionals say that this scanning system is prone to errors and inaccurate reporting.

Some critics also point to the unreliable access controls built into the PCOS system, so that election cheats need only find a way to hack into the system and manipulate votes. Because of the electronic nature of the canvas, the results would not show any badge of fraud or any indication that they were actually tampered with. The machines, therefore, would actually facilitate rather than thwart widespread cheating during the elections. Some have even suggested that the PCOS machines themselves could already come rigged on election day, and none of us would be the wiser.

Still others paint a more chilling doomsday scenario and point to the possibility of a wholesale breakdown in the machines themselves or in the electronic canvassing of the ballots, resulting in a massive failure of elections. Already, malicious minds have implied that some entrenched interests are preparing to use widespread blackouts on election day to manufacture a failure of elections scenario on May 10, 2010.

In defense of the PCOS machines, however, Atty. Ferdinand Rafanan, COMELEC Law Department chief, said that the COMELEC’s chosen automation system still provides for adequate security features to safeguard the sanctity of the ballot. He points to multi-layer security mechanisms such as 128-bit encryption smart keys and passwords which are needed to start-up and operate the PCOS machines and to transmit results once the elections are completed. He also cites the print-out of unalterable audit log reports which can supposedly detect any fraudulent use or operation of the machines. In any event, because of the existence of paper-based ballots, Rafanan points out that the COMELEC will always have a failsafe alternative to refer to, should the PCOS machines fail on election day.

Still, these security features are not enough, at least to the minds of lawyer Harry Roque and his Concerned Citizens Movement (CCM). On July 9, 2009, Roque filed a petition before the Supreme Court seeking to enjoin the COMELEC from signing the poll automation contract with Smartmatic TIM Corporation, the joint-venture company considered the best complying bidder. Roque argued that under Republic Act No. 9369, any automated election must first undergo “pilot testing” in specified areas in the Philippines before full-blown automation can be conducted. That COMELEC failed to hold such pilot testing or did not require it in its automation contract shows that it abused its discretion in awarding the contract to Smartmatic TIM Corporation. Roque also said that the PCOS machines themselves do not satisfy the minimum system capabilities required by Republic Act No. 9369 to safeguard the integrity of the ballot. In particular, the petition cites the failure of the PCOS machines to “assure accuracy in the recording and reading of votes, as well as in the tabulation, consolidation/canvassing, electronic transmission, storage results and accurate ballot counting.”

In a 7-3 Decision handed down on September 10, 2009, however, the Supreme Court denied Roque’s petition and ruled that “pilot testing” is not required for the upcoming May 10, 2010 elections. Noting that the language of the law did require automation ”in at least two highly urbanized cities and two provinces each in Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao” during the May 9, 2007 elections, the Court said that the COMELEC’s failure to automate at that time did not mean that it could not fully automate in subsequent electoral exercises. In the Court’s judgment, the intention of Congress in passing Republic Act No. 9369 was to fully automate all elections after the 2007 polls, regardless of whether automation was actually done in 2007.

In addition, the Court also ruled that the PCOS machines themselves met the minimum capability standard required by Republic Act No. 9369. The Court pointed to the COMELEC-prescribed 26-item checklist criteria which the PCOS machines passed with an accuracy rating of at least 99.995%. Finding no legal infirmity in the automation contract with Smartmatic TIM Corporation, therefore, the Court confidently said that “even though the [automated election system] has its flaws, COMELEC and Smartmatic have seen to it that the system is well-protected with sufficient security measures in order to ensure honest elections.” This conclusion was echoed by no less than the Chief Justice, Raynato Puno, in a separate concurring opinion, where he said: “Absent any capricious and whimsical exercise judgment on the part of the COMELEC, its determination of the appropriate election technology, as well as the procedure for its procurement, should be respected. The fear of automation failure should not overwhelm us.”

The practical effect of the Supreme Court’s September 10, 2009 Decision, of course, is to remove all legal roadblocks to the full automation of the 2010 elections. In the coming months, therefore, COMELEC is expected to conduct personnel training for about 160,000 personnel who will be operating the PCOS machines, and is also scheduled to release an initial 5% tranche of the P7.2 Billion contract to Smartmatic TIM Corporation.

But the Supreme Court’s confidence in the automated system, in stark contrast to its findings in the Mega Pacific decision of 2004, provides little comfort to nay-sayers who continue to prophesy gloom and doom on May 10, 2010. Indeed, the Supreme Court may be many things, but varied may its competencies be under the law, it cannot yet predict the future, much less, guaranty the success of the 2010 elections. Beyond this seemingly alarmist attitude, however, what is obvious is the public’s basic and persistent distrust towards both the government and the COMELEC tasked with implementing automation.

Few, if any, dispute the need for automation. But implicit in this need for automation is the honesty and integrity of the persons and institutions tasked to implement it. This is especially true with the upcoming elections, as fraud, now imbued with an electronic, and therefore, intangible character, will be much more difficult to detect, prove and correct. With what we have thus far seen, heard and known of the COMELEC, is it worthy of the Filipino people’s trust? And while we may certainly adopt the COMELEC’s “give it a try” stance now affirmed by no less than the Supreme Court, many are led to ask whether our democracy is that resilient that it will be able to adopt to such a drastic leap forward. The cliché holds true, therefore, now, more than ever: indeed, only time can really tell.

Having Faith

2009-11-24T21:07:00.009+08:00

St. Paul he tells us that faith is the substance of things hoped for; it is the evidence of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1).

The Greek word used by St. Paul to describe faith in this passage is telling: uπόστασις (hupostasis), which, literally means, “to stand under; to support.”

For St. Paul, therefore, faith is, or should be, the basis, the foundation, the substance of everything we hope for, everything we look forward to, everything that is uncertain in tomorrow. It is the bedrock upon which we anchor our days.

But we are corporeal beings; we are afraid and anxious of what we cannot see. Just as the future frightens us, the faith upon which we are asked to anchor our future is itself elusive and unseen. What is it then that we must believe in? What is the assurance that our faith is not for naught?

By ourselves, therefore, by our limited human reason, we cannot believe. It is in this sense that we are told that faith is gift.

Grant us, therefore, this gift of faith, that we may be able to look with the future in hope and expectation. Reassure us, dear Lord, of what we, on our own, cannot reassure ourselves: that all shall indeed be well.

We pray this through the intercession of St. Teresa of Avila, who, by her life, showed us how it is to live with that “substance,” that faith, which makes living truly a work of hope:

Nada te turbe
Nada te espante
Todo se pasa, Dios no se muda
La paciencia todo lo alcanza
Quien a Dios tiene nada le falta
Solo Dios basta

Amen.

Inertia

2009-10-19T10:15:00.001+08:00

A body persists in its state of rest or of uniform motion
unless acted upon by an external unbalanced force.
- Newton’s First Law of Motion

As sure as science, she fell, hard and irresistibly, towards his center of gravity. It was not that she intended to, or had any deliberate intention of being caught hopelessly in orbit around him. But as imperceptible as the laws of attraction go, she found herself drawn to him and his laughter, suddenly and inexplicably, the way gravity draws a river inexorably to the sea.

Things began innocently enough: group lunches with fellow workmates, innocuous chats during breaktime, unexpected connections. The romantics among them called it latent magnetism, a textbook example of opposites attract. Whatever it was, howewver,— magnetism, gravity, insanity— one thing was certain: she was not like any of the other girls that he had once upon a time dated; because what many thought to be that which was irresistible about him was not what she herself had fallen in love with. She was not overwhelmed by his presence or attracted by his celebrity; neither was it the idea of having been chosen over other oogling girls that made their hand-holding sweeter, or more meaningful. No. It was his vulnerability and his passion that made her a true believer. It was his willingness to damn the world for his art, and for his art alone, that defined for her the meaning of integrity. She even bought curtains for him, gaddamit. And she knew that she was in love.

But when all was said and done, as work and life and making a living made wider their shared universe, it became apparent that he eventually had to choose. And when the conflict between his heart and his art had led him to decide, he decided for his art, but wanted his heart as well. She was willing to give it, truth be told— to let him have his cake and eat it too. But he decided for both of them: It was for the best, because I don’t want to hurt you.

And before she knew it, that orbit which both of them had found so comfortable and endearing, had, for her, turned into a vortex of emotions and questions, sucking her ever downward and ever inward, into a spiral of self-doubt. Was I not good enough? Will I ever find anyone like him again?

She knew, of course, that their parting was really for the best— for he was who he was, after all, and in the end. It was too much to expect him to change.

It was just a matter of time.

So in moments of weakness, when vortices of longing threatened yet again to draw her into him, she knew that all it was, was the momentum of the past, the forward circular motion that formerly fixed her way, and nothing more. Soon, soon, even this motion would cease, all energy would be spent, and she would, if not already, break free, chart a different course, set a different motion, move to a different heartbeat: finally, that of her own.

First Friday Food Club: Lemuria

2009-10-16T23:46:00.014+08:00

The traffic leading to San Juan was unusually bad that Friday evening; or it was probably because I had to make a necessary detour to the Ateneo Law School campus in Rockwell to photocopy cases for next semester’s classes in Constitutional Law— whatever it was, by the time Yang and I picked up Awee in Loyola Heights, I had already made two phone calls to Lemuria asking that they hold our table even after our reservation time of 7:30PM. I was determined not to lose our table.

Tucked away in a corner of Horseshow Village in San Juan, I had many times noticed the sign along Horseshoe Drive while on my way to work in the morning: Lemuria and the Wine Cellar. Having already heard some bits and pieces from other foodies in the past, I decided that, for this month’s First Friday Food Club—already postponed one week because of Yang’s busy, busy schedule— we were all to trek to Quezon City for our monthly gastronomical feast. We would not be disappointed.

We arrived at around 8:10PM, and were greeted by a uniformed guard at the gate, asking for our reservation. “Ay, sa wakas, dumating na kayo, Attorney,” he said, radioing in our arrival. We were led down a lighted driveway towards a Mediterranean style house at the end. To our left was a private residence, which we figured belonged to the restaurant owner. We ascended, and were welcomed by a bevy of waiters with earpieces and radios, and a handful of patrons, numbering no more than ten.

We were led to the far table, laden with tall goblets, plates and silverware, and we felt instantly awkward—as though we had arrived late at a small, exclusive dinner party, and we were the only guests left unserved. We all gave each other amused looks as we sat down, knowing that our conversation, boisterous as we often were during these monthly reunions, would surely destroy the ambience. We knew, therefore, that we barbarians from Makati would have to be on our best behavior, if only to prove that we were somewhat cultured and deserved to sit in a restaurant such as Lemuria without having to deal with annoyed glances from other more discriminating patrons.

But the initial awkwardness subsided quickly, as we got lost in the coziness of our surroundings. It was a little too close and friendly, in fact, that no sooner had we been seated at our table that we began to eavesdrop on the conversation of the couple in the next table.

The menus having been handed out, I scanned the selection which boasted of an extensive list of appretizers and entrées. I had wanted to start with the seared foie gras, braised cabbage and fig glaze, but found that it was too expensive for my taste (it was around P880 a plate!), so I just settled for a garden salad with balsamic vinegar which Yang, Awee and I would share. For good measure, I ordered asparagus soup, which the waiter said was the soup of the day.

For our main course, Yang and Awee chose the risotto of New Zealand mussels, prawn and sweet pimiento while I, wanting to be a little healthy for a change, initially decided on the halibut, which the menu described to be baked in vine leaves with spices and aromatics. Disappointed that I would not eat foie gras, however, Yang suggested that I try the grilled wagyu steak, which the waiter affirmed as the restaurant’s best seller. The moment of hesitation passed quickly, and I asked that the steak be cooked rare.

On the wine, however, we struggled a little, as Lemuria had quite an extensive wine list to choose from. (Apparently, the owners of the restaurant also owned Brumms, a company which marketed foreign wines locally). We eventually settled on a 2007 California Pinot Noir, which was affordable yet proved to be perfect for the evening’s entrée picks.

After ordering, we were served bread which we ate with tasty tomato and pate spread, and an amuse-bouche of salami and eggplant quiche. My asparagus soup, which I unfortunately found a little too tasteless, came shortly thereafter. Awee, ever the envious one, did not want to be outdone, and asked for an additional order of mushroom and gruyere soup. We both ended up swapping our appetizers, however, as Awee fancied my tasteless asparagus soup, while I enjoyed her mushroom and gruyere.

But the highlight of my evening, of course, was my grilled wagyu steak, which was served with salad, mashed potatos and mushroom sauce. It was, bar none, the softest steak that I have ever tasted. My dinnermates, therefore, had to endure occassional and prolonged pleasured grunts and groans as I savored the meat which, quite literally, melted in my mouth. So much did I enjoy this steak that I am officially including the Lemuria wagyu as among the very best steaks I have ever had, right alongside Antonio’s and Gaudi’s.

We ended with conversations over Neuchatel Cheesecake—sweet yet sedate, a perfect counterpoint to the evening. We left at around 10:30PM, the last party to leave Lemuria that night. We were a little over budget, although with the food and the privacy, it was something to be expected. While the prices were quite limiting, therefore, our Lemuria experience was certainly pleasant and worth the occassional expense.

5 Julieta Circle, Horseshoe Village, Quezon City
Tel. No.: +632.724.5211
http://www.lemuria.com.ph
http://www.brumms.com.ph

For Whom the Bell Tolls

2009-10-04T23:18:00.011+08:00

“. . . never send to know from whom the bell tolls,
it tolls for thee . . .”
John Dunne

I had first noticed the shortness of breath only about a month ago, while going around the office during my usual afternoon stroll. While I had complained for some months now of an on-again, off-again dull pain on the left side of my chest, doctor friends told me that it was probably more of a muscle issue than anything else. I knew, of course, that I was out of shape, and navigating a flight of stairs had usually left me short-winded. But I figured that these symptoms were merely the manifestation of the need to get some physical exercise. And so, I decided to resume my former gym regimen, and I managed to get through around thirty minutes on the treadmill, and another thirty minutes with weight training, four times a week for the last three weeks. While I did feel tired and uncomfortable after each session, I thought hat this was just the usual aches and pains common with resuming physical activity after a long period of sedentariness.

Last week, however, on one particularly hectic afternoon, I found myself dizzy and severely short of breath after having to climb a flight of stairs to a conference room. Luckily, the company physician was on-call, and I had myself diagnosed immediately after the meeting. He said that while it did not seem particularly serious, he had observed, through his stethoscope, that I had an irregular heartbeat, and therefore suggested that I see a cardiologist and undergo ECG testing at the soonest possible time.

I got particularly scared for a couple of minutes after that diagnosis. The hypochondriac in me started to calculate the worst-case scenarios. Considering that I had been experiencing the symptoms for about three weeks now, and coupled with that dull chest pain from months and months ago, I convinced myself that I had some serious medical condition which would soon cause my death. I certainly did not want to go to bed that night, and suddenly not wake up the next day.

For my own peace of mind, therefore, I drove myself after work to the emergency room of the Cardinal Santos Medical Center, in San Juan, and complained of my shortness of breath and dizziness. I told them of the company doctor’s earlier diagnosis of an irregular heartbeat, and how he had suggested that I should get an ECG in short order. They ushered me into a gurney at the corner of the emergency room, drew the cloth partition, and connected my finger to a contraption that measured my blood oxygen level. The nurse, as she wheeled a printer-like machine right beside the gurney, asked me to take off my shirt and remove all metallic objects from my body. She then began attaching wires to my chest which were fastened with what looked like suction cups. It was an ECG machine. Moments later, I watched as scribbles emerge, much like a fax machine produced a telephone message-- the electrical impulses from my heart. The nurse took the read-out and said that I should wait for the doctor on duty to interpret the findings.

The verdict: Blood oxygen level, normal. ECG results, normal. But what of my dizziness and shortness of breath, I asked. It could be many things, the doctor said. It could even be psychosomatic. So he suggested further tests to be sure. But he reassured me that whatever it was, it did not seem at all life threatening, at least from what the instruments told him.

I was relieved, of course, as I drove home from the hospital. But I still did not know what was wrong with me, if ever there was even anything wrong with me at all. I knew that I was (and still am) experiencing episodes of dizziness and shortness of breath, even after the most sedate of physical activities. So I asked our family cardiologist to prescribe a series of tests that I should take, if only to rule things out, or generate baseline findings against which subsequent tests or check ups can be compared.

What was terrifying about this whole experience was the fact that I was worrying about this now, at age thirty. Was I not too young, I thought.

But reflecting on it more deeply, I realized that while I was not exactly old, neither can I call myself relatively young. Unfortunate as it may seem, I realized that I am no longer invincible. And coupled with this realization is a nascent yet acute knowledge that one day, sometime soon, the movement of body and quickness of feet will not be as it used to. In short, I was confronted with the truth of my mortality. In short, I was reminded that I was actually going to die.

What was it that Homer wrote in the Iliad about death—

As the generation of leaves, so the generations of men.
For the wind pours the leaves out on the ground,
But the wood blooms and grows and begets in the season of spring.
So too the generations of men: now they bloom, now they pass away.

Too often, I suppose, with the hopes and plans and dreams of day to day living, I have gotten caught up in the belief that everything is a possibility, and life somehow goes on forever. Or at least, that there will still always be a tomorrow, or a chance to start again. It is an easy enough delusion to accept, so that it sometimes comes as an uncomfortable intrusion, these occasional reminders of mortality that nonetheless are just as true as the possibility of tomorrow. I am, after all, as that ubiquitous philosopher of death, Martin Heidegger, put it: Sein-zum-tode, a being-unto-death.

It was not because Heidegger was being nihilistic (or even morose) when he described man as a being directed towards dying. On the contrary, Heidegger points out that it is because of this fact-- that all men will ultimately die-- that man’s existence finds meaning. He believes that death is not an external “event” that happens to man at the end of his life. Instead, death is inbuilt into man’s very essence, and every moment of his life is actually in anticipation of it, whether consciously or unconsciously. It is the canvass against which human life is lived. “As soon as man comes to life,” he says, “he is at once old enough to die.” Therefore, the awareness and acceptance of death, while difficult or uncomfortable, is a requirement for authentic existence. Death makes life authentic.

The challenge, therefore, is to go on with life, knowing that one day, there is death. Indeed, it is a knowing that should not be fearful or fatalistic, but an acceptance that death— or, in my case, getting older— is just really just a part of life. I suppose the key is not to worry too much, to be cautious where caution is needed, but, by and large, to live, nonetheless. After all, to borrow the words of Sara Teasdale, “Time is a kind friend. He will make us old.”

Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten,
Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold.
Let it be forgotten forever and ever,
Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.

If anyone asks, say it was forgotten
Long and long ago,
As a flower, as a fire, as a hushed footfall
In a long-forgotten snow.

Nĭ hăo: In Praise of Language

2009-09-21T23:16:00.002+08:00

I am now on my sixth week of learning Mandarin at the Confucius Institute at the Ateneo, and apart from the usual struggles of learning an entirely different and unnatural system of pronunciation, memorizing basic vocabulary, and actually finding the time to study, it has been a very fruitful and enriching experience.

The decision to enroll at the Confucius Institute came quite suddenly, when, after visiting a friend at the Department of European Studies at the new Leong Hall of the University, I chanced upon a poster advertising basic Mandarin classes. After having been exposed to a number of European languages in the past, I thought that it was time to try out a new Asian language. Finding my Saturday afternoons free, therefore, I decided to take the opportunity by availing of my faculty discount, while, at the same time, bullying my friend to join me in the class as well.

I would later on learn that two other friends from the law school had also enrolled in the same basic Chinese course, but at the Ateneo’s Makati campus. Since then, all four of us have been occasionally engaged in random conversations of Nĭ hăo ma, Wŏ yào hē kĕlè and Nĭ xĭhuān wŏ nán péngyou.

They say, of course, that apart from the obvious difficulty of learning Chinese characters (a matter to be taught in subsequent Chinese classes but not in this basic course), conversational Mandarin is much easier to master than conversational English. And from what I have observed thus far, the language does seem to dispense with the use of definite or indefinite articles. Neither does it have any tenses or conjugation in the strict sense.

But while there may be areas where the language lacks complexity, there are also aspects that challenge non-native speakers like me: particularly, in the fact that Chinese is a hopelessly tonal language. This means that the meaning of a word is differentiated by the tones accompanying the pronunciation of that particular word, as opposed to the pronunciation of the words themselves. In Chinese, for example, the word for mother and the word for horse is “ma,” and the distinction between the two is the way the word “ma” is intoned. It would not be unlikely, therefore, for an English-speaker like me, not at all sensitive to the nuances of tone and pronunciation, to mistakenly describe my mother as a horse!

At this point, however, I am quite content with dropping polite Chinese phrases when talking to my Chinese-speaking co-workers who are, no doubt, amused to no end at my attempt to speak Mandarin while butchering the language in the process.

* * *

Perhaps my fascination with language began in my Philosophy of Language classes with the late Fr. Thomas Greene, S.J. in my undergraduate days at the Ateneo. At that time, I was already fluent in English and Filipino, and had taken two semesters of Spanish with Señora Heidi Aquino. But it was not until Fr. Green’s class that I truly appreciated the nature of language qua language as more than a mere tool for communication, but as a characteristically unique human activity— a reflection of his innate nature to make meaning.

It is believed that as human beings, we have an innate ability to learn language. It is built into the very fiber of our being. In fact, there is a theory advanced by linguistic theorist Noam Chomsky called the Theory of Universal Grammar which posits the existence of a certain built-in language competence in man— a universal or core grammar capacity existing as a deep mental structure— that gives rise to all the different grammars of the different languages of the world. Indeed, nowhere can this natural affinity for language be most clearly demonstrated than in children who have been observed to possess the unique ability to “absorb” language, particularly at a very young age.

Formally defined, of course, language is an organized system of conventional signs that allows us to communicate something about the world in a meaningful way. It is conventional, first of all, because it is based upon a social convention. Language, after all, is a social phenomenon. If we did not have other people to communicate with, it is unlikely that language would have developed at all. Thus, persons using the same language have come to an “agreement” that a particular combination of sounds will refer to a particular and designated meaning which, in turn, corresponds to a “thing” in the world.

When an English speaker says the word “dog,” for example, listeners who understand the English language will understand the word to mean the four-legged animal that barks. The designation, however, is purely arbitrary, so that persons speaking French can say chien, while Germans can say hund, while Spaniards can say perro, with all such words referring to the same four-legged animal that barks.

More than being conventional, however, language is also said to be metaphorical; it points to something beyond or outside itself— it communicates a “fact” about the world. It is in this realm that language takes on a decidedly metaphysical character. As Martin Heidegger famously said in his Letter on Humanism, “Language is the house of Being.” Through language, reality is revealed. Thus, if classical metaphysics posits that all being, if it is being, is co-natural, i.e., that it is capable of being known by the human mind, such knowing is always filtered and mediated through the medium of language. People’s sense of reality, therefore, is embedded and embodied in the language in which they speak and are immersed. Filipinos, for example, have many words for rice such as kanin, palay and bigas and the Inuit are said to have fifty different words referring to ice and snow. Germans, meanwhile, even have a word to describe the empty space between two objects— zwischenraum. Indeed, to borrow a classic phrase from Wittgenstein, each culture and each people has its own unique language game, spectacles through which they experience the world.

With this recognition of the centrality of language in thought and philosophy— the so-called, linguistic turn— some thinkers have taken the position to the extreme: they believe that the study of language alone could result in the only objective philosophy. These thinkers rejected the whole notion of metaphysics since this could not be objectively or empirically proven. For them, the true and genuine task of philosophy, therefore, is to clarify the meanings of basic concepts and assertions (especially those of science), through an analysis of language, and not to attempt to answer unanswerable questions such as those regarding the nature of ultimate reality or of the Absolute.

Wittgenstein, in his later philosophy and exemplified in his Philosophical Investigations, tried to temper and reign in these tendencies by espousing what was later on to be called Ordinary Language Philosophy. While not exactly veering away from the empiricism which characterized his earlier thought, Wittgenstein said that the proper approach to the study of language is to understand how it is used in everyday life. Through such an understanding, Wittgenstein believed that we will be able to “dissolve” the appearances of philosophical problems which are, in any event, rooted in a misunderstanding of what words actually mean, which, in turn, leadis the philosopher to take words in abstraction and out of context. The point of Wittgenstein, I suspect, is to understand language as it is, and not to place them artificially within a philosophical petri-dish, removed from reality.

This method of analyzing language as it is used has led philosophers to recognize that language is littered with dead metaphors. While language is itself metaphorical in that it relates to a fact in reality, once that connection has been established, language has a tendency of fossilizing these connections into rigid concepts as they are used and passed on from one speaker to the next. As explained by Guy Deutscher in the book, The Unfolding of Language, language is actually formed from an edifice of dead metaphors:

“…tracing a stream of metaphors that runs right through language and flows from the concrete to the abstract. In this constant surge, the simplest and sturdiest of words are swept along, one after another, and carried toward abstract meanings. As these words drift downstream, they are bleached of their original vitality and turn into pale lifeless terms for abstract concepts— the substance from which the structure of language is formed. And when at last the river sinks into the sea, these spent metaphors are deposited, layer after layer, and so the structure of language grows, as a reef of dead metaphors.”

We need only look at the English language to find an abundance of such dead metaphors. The word sarcophagus, for example, comes from the ancient Greek words σαρξ (sarx) which means flesh, and φαγειν (phagein) which is the Greek verb, to eat. When the Greeks attempted to describe a stone coffin, therefore, they described it as λιθος σαρκοφάγος (lithos sacophagos), or flesh-eating stone. Another example is the word nostalgia, which is defined as the psychological condition of longing for the past. In describing this feeling, a medical student coined the phrase in 1688 by using the ancient Greek words νόστος (nostos) or “homecoming” and άλγος (algos) which means “pain” or “longing.” Nostalgia, therefore, and quite literally, is the longing or pain for home.

Because of the tendency of language to fossilize into dead metaphors, philosophers have constantly emphasized the need to return to the original experience of being, to that point when the initial encounter or “surprise” of existence gives rise to new meanings and words. The whole point, therefore, is to always return to being, to that primordial experience when existence is said to have revealed itself to consciousness, thereby giving rise to the true essence of language. This was the point of Fredrick Nietzsche in his essay, Truth and Falsity in an Extra-moral Sense, where he says that our use of language, either in telling the truth, or in telling lies, should not be judged by their moral content, but by the creativity of their utterance. Through this creativity, we are actually reviving these dead metaphors and revitalizing our use of language. As C.S. Lewis noted in Bluspels and Flalansferes, “when the metaphor becomes fossilized, our ‘thinking’ is not thinking at all, but mere sound or mere incipient movements in the larynx.”

This is one of the reasons, I suspect, why philosophers like Fr. Roque Ferriols, S.J., himself a fluent speaker of no less than 8 languages including Latin and ancient Greek, chose to philosophize in Filipino. Because language mediates being, it is important to use that particular language which best and most naturally mediates being to us Filipinos. For Fr. Ferriols, this language is Filipino (or, in his words, Northern Sampalokese). Immersed in this language, therefore, we, who also speak this language, are able to make first contact with the world, and our experience of being becomes more pristine and alive. Thus, for Fr. Ferriols, the term “being” cannot simply be translated into his Filipino term, “meron,” since the Filipino experience of meron is quite different from the Western experience of being. Maraming pagkakapareho, he would say. Ngunit marami ring pagkakaiba.

Filipino, however, being a language like any other, is also susceptible to the fossilization of metaphor. In these situations, Fr. Ferriols’ commitment to being is clear: we must always be vigilant and turn towards that initial taste and experience for existence, never to be complacent and trapped in static concepts— Danasin mo. Tumingin ka. Lundagin mo, beybe!

Understood in this way, and beyond its obvious practical benefits, the learning of foreign languages, and even of those no longer used today such as Latin, takes on an existential dimension— for just as one’s native tongue captures his people’s primordial meeting of consciousness with being, so does the native tongue of foreign and ancient peoples capture their own primordial meeting. Learning these languages, therefore, opens the learner to a whole milieu of experience not otherwise available to him through his native tongue, and one which ultimately enriches his understanding and appreciation for the complexity of being itself.

Zipping (through Life)

2009-09-20T22:44:00.003+08:00

It was not the falling that frightened me.
It was the sudden stop, at the end,
That was truly terrifying.

One Place

2009-09-16T13:14:00.005+08:00

In the end, if you take care
You can be happy or unhappy anywhere.
"One Place," Everything but the Girl

His third hotel room in so many weeks, 2,500 kilometers cross-crossing the Philippines and Asia: he sat now on his bed typing, with only the television to keep him company, and the whir of the air conditioning to lull him to sleep. He found consolation in this anonymity.

Being alone in a city that did not know him, around people he would never see again, there was a feeling that the past did not matter anymore, and that he could be anyone he wanted to be, at least for the meantime. He walked the streets not knowing where he was, but always with a feeling that a surprise was just waiting around the corner.

Why is it that places and pasts are always so inextricably linked? he wondered. Why is it that history and existence always happen in a particular milieu, a particular setting, with a particular set of people and a particular set of truths, which cannot really be chosen or undone? He was dasein, thrust into reality, condemned to choose (as the philosopher tells us), condemned to be free.

But all that was unimportant now. It was enough that he was in a new place, traveling, moving around. He knew he could not outrun the past, of course, and not that he wanted to—futile exercise that it was. But here, he could, for the meantime, in this one place, in this one city, choose the promise of a now and of a future. Perhaps that was what it was all about, anyway: change, living with what is given, but choosing the now and the future nonetheless, where ever he may be. He knew that with this hope in his heart, no matter where his travels or his tribulations took him, he would always still somehow find his way home.

Where Were You When the World Changed?

2009-09-11T23:59:00.001+08:00

There are few dates in a generation that serve to locate an era or an epoch— dates which divide days and years into the old and the new, the before and the after.

I was having dinner at a function room at the Rockwell Club in Makati celebrating the birthday of a law school classmate when news that an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center was sent to me through my cell phone. It was September 11, 2001.

Upon hearing the news, I at first thought that it was the World Trade Center in Roxas Boulevard, in Manila, that was the site of the unfortunate accident. It was only when one of my classmates directed me to the television in the adjacent room that I realized from CNN that it was the World Trade Center in New York City that that had just been struck by what seemed to be a wayward airplane. The North Tower was then already belching thick black smoke, and commentaries at that time were all still confirming the nature of the crash.

Initial reports suggested that it was merely an unfortunate accident, but recalling the earlier bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, a terrorist attack was not beyond the realm of possibility. All the speculation was confirmed moments later, when a second plane slammed into the World Trade Center’s South Tower. I watched in disbelief as an explosion mushroomed from the top of that second building. I remember the news anchors’ stunned silence as the screen showed a bright red, a blurry shadow of an aircraft crashing into the structure only moments earlier. There was no doubt now that we were witnessing a terrorist attack. It was 9:03 pm, Manila Time.

I got home at around 11PM later that evening to catch the CNN video of the twin towers’ eventual almost simultaneous collapse. Standing in front of the television screen, I recalled that summer in 1995 when I had the chance to visit the World Trade Center up close. Looking towards the sky that crisp April day, I recall having been swept up by the immensity and permanence of the Twin Towers; to my young and naïve mind, they were the grandest man-made structures I had then ever seen. I even climbed to the observation deck at the 110th Floor of the South Tower, more than 1,300 feet above New York City, and I recall with vivid wonder the magnificent views of downtown Manhattan, the East River, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty, even New Jersey, for almost 55 miles. Now, those same magnificent and seemingly permanent structures were burning before my eyes. It was indeed an awesome and terrifying sight: watching such gigantic buildings fall so spectacularly, in a think plume of grey-black smoke, and with a suddenness that was difficult to comprehend.

* * *

The view that September day was quite different for Marlyn Bautista. An officer at the accounts payable department, Marlyn worked at the 94th Floor of the North Tower, in the insurance company of Marsh & McLennan.

Her husband, Rameses Bautista, shares that Marlyn liked to wake up early for work, in order to avoid rush hour traffic. The Bautistas lived in Iselin, New Jersey and Marlyn would take the Metro Park Loop bus every morning on her way to the train station which would take her to Manhattan, and eventually, the Twin Towers. She often stopped at a downtown church to pray. But on September 11, 2001, she went straight to her office, at the 94th Floor.

At 8:46 that morning, American Airlines Flight 11 crashed directly into Marlyn’s office. Marlyn’s sister, who also worked in the building but arrived in the area a little later than Marlyn, found smoke pouring out of the top of the North Tower. She rushed to their usual church hoping to find Marlyn there, as had been her routine, before proceeding to work. But Marlyn wasn’t there. And almost without thinking, Marlyn’s sister rushed to the Trade Center Complex, only to witness the building itself come crashing to the ground.

Marlyn never made it down from the 93rd Floor of the North Tower. She, like countless others, died in the terrible carnage of fuel and flames that would later on, and forever be remembered as 9/11. We remember them today as the first victims of a war that until then, offered no face or nationality. Days later, the attackers would be given a name, and a network of financed terror that would later on strike Bali, Madrid and London was laid bare to all the world. Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden became household names. And the world would never be the same.

* * *

Hannah Arendt was a German philosopher who lived through the horrors of the Second World War. Arendt, herself a Jew, asks how man, a species unique in its reason and intellect, could instead embrace irrationality, unreality, and evil. She situates these reflections against an analysis of totalitarianism, that unique and terrible political ideology that emerged in Europe during that era, and wondered whether in the face of all this atrocity and death, “[i]s rational reflection even possible?”

Arendt, of course, answered this in the affirmative. Unlike other post-war philosophers that took a nihilistic view of reason and man, proclaiming even, that “man is a useless passion,” Arendt remained committed to the centrality of reason in human conduct. Arendt rejected the twin views that this festering totalitarianism was beyond rational explanation, and that reason was itself a fantasy. In her quest to understand this radically novel political form, Arendt remained steadfastly committed to reason and its demands. Her observations are quite telling: evil does not appear to be borne from innate human weakness or wickedness, but from a tendency to abandon rationality. Man simply forgets to think, to apply what she calls to be common sense. Thus—

Some years ago, reporting the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem, I spoke of “the banality of evil” and meant with this no theory or doctrine but something quite factual, the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was a perhaps extraordinary shallowness. However monstrous the deeds were, the doer was neither monstrous nor demonic, and the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity, but a curious, quite authentic inability to think. [Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture,” in Moral Matters and Considerations, A Textbook for Foundations of Moral Value, ed. Nemesio S. Que, S.J., New Manila, 2000.]

One of the central characteristics of this totalitarianism, Arendt notes, is a persistent substitution of fantasy for reality which eventually erodes the social sphere or common world that disallows the fantasized assimilation of the other. According to Arendt, the essential characteristic of totalitarianism is its desire to dominate the human being as a means to effect the greater and perhaps more fantastic of its goals: total world domination through the subjugation of races. Indeed, it is an objective that, when placed within the context of reason and common sense, certainly reeks of irrationality and fantastic impossibility. Yet with the breakdown of the common world, the fantastic takes on the character of the real, and this irrationality, a semblance of reasonability. The totalitarian world is a world turned up-side-down.

Nothing captures this tendency towards fantasy in totalitarianism than the concentration camps of Nazi Germany which Arendt considers as the consummate illustration of the totalitarian condition. Here, all elements of the totalitarian project are achieved, resulting in the total domination of the human person. In the death camps littered across Poland and Germany, all reason seemed to breakdown: the impossible become possible, and reality seemed to stand on its head. Thus, even in the face of incontrovertible testimonial evidence by survivors of these death camps, their accounts, even as they became more and more authentic, become less and less believable. As Arendt herself observes:

None of these reports inspires those passions of outrage and sympathy through which men have always been mobilized for justice. On the contrary, anyone speaking or writing about concentration camps is still regarded as suspect; and if the speaker has resolutely returned to the world of the living, he himself is often assailed by doubts with regard to his own truthfulness, as though he had mistaken a nightmare for reality. [Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 439]

It is for this reason that Arendt describes the death camps as dream-like, unreal, and nightmarish. All the conditions that made the world real were absent in this place of death: there were no consequences connected to actions, no recognition of individuality, no intelligible meaning to events— in a word, nothing made sense because there was no world that could be shared.

Elie Wiesel, Nobel Prize-winning author, recounts an eloquent example of this arbitrariness and unintelligibility:

We continued our march. We were gradually drawing closer to the ditch from which an infernal heat was rising. Still twenty steps to go. If I wanted to bring about my own death, this was the moment. Our line had now only fifteen paces to cover. I bit my lips so that my father would not hear my teeth chattering. Ten steps still. Eight. Seven. We marched slowly on, as though following a hearse at our own funeral. Four steps more. Three steps. There it was now, right in front of us, the pit and its flames. I gathered all that was left of my strength, so that I could break from the ranks and throw myself upon the barbed wire. In the depths of my heart, I bade farewell to my father, to the whole universe; and, in spite of myself, the words formed themselves and issued in a whisper from my lips: Yitgadal veyitkadach shme rada. . . May His name be blessed and magnified. . . My heart was bursting. The moment had come. I was face to face with the Angel of Death. . .

No. Two steps from the pit we were ordered to turn to the left and made to go into the barracks. [Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Bantam Book, 1960), p. 31]

In the face of seeming death, Elie Wiesel did not die. But his mother and sister did, for no apparent reason whatsoever. “Men to the left. Women to the right”— who knew why this person had to be sent to the gas chambers, and the next person spared? Who understood why mother and son had to be separated? Everything appeared to be a matter of chance: the paralyzing effect of uncertainty deprived the individual of all desire to act, to live in community, to become. Reason itself seemed to have been gassed and burned in the death camps of Poland and Germany, together with the innocents of the Jewish people.

These accounts, and many others, Arendt uses to demonstrate not only the unrealities of the Nazi Death Camps but the seeming incomprehensibility of totalitarianism and how it confounds the limits of accepted categories of political thought and norms of moral conduct. In the face of this historical fact, all reason appears to break down: do not try to understand, as expressed by a camp survivor. Yet Arendt’s commitment to reason is undiminished. In the face of this incomprehensibility, she strives to find explanations and categories for this new and threatening totalitarianism; for to accept this facticity as impenetrable even to human reason would be to negate not only the survivors’ sacrifice, but man’s very humanity as well.

Having thus penetrated through this mist of incomprehensibility, Arendt suggests that the only way to regain this sense of reality, this to return to a common world of shared ideas, is through forgiveness. Arendt recognizes that human relationships are fragile, ethereal, and even unpredictable, and that totalitarian assimilation and alienation is an ever-present reality. Thus, it is imperative that individuals and societies be willing to make and to accept reparations. Indeed, as Arendt observes, without the possibility of forgiveness, man cannot be released from the clutches of the past, from the mistakes of totalitarianism, as man’s capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which he could never recover; man would be a victim of its consequences forever.

But because of the innate unpredictability of human relationships, Arendt believes that forgiveness is not enough; restoring the common world requires man to be able to make and keep promises, to affirm the possibility of maintaining a stable future.

Forgiveness and promise, therefore, are two sides of the same coin— for as forgiveness serves to undo the deeds of the past, promises serve to create, in an ocean of uncertainty, islands of security for the future without which community would not be possible in the relationships between men. Arendt believes, in fact, that forgiveness and promise are the highest manifestation of community in the shared space; for indeed, no one can forgive himself and no one can feel bound by a promise made only to himself. Forgiveness and promise, therefore, necessarily involve the other, and are guarantees to the perpetuation of a shared community. Where there is forgiveness and promise, community exists.

* * *

While on the surface, the terror attacks of 9/11 partake of a religious, fanatical preoccupation, many of its characteristics hew closely to Arendt’s conception of man’s tendency towards totalitarianism. It may be true that the techniques have changed from the death camps of Nazi Germany— commercial jets crashing into skyscrapers, bombs planted in trucks, and death-powder enclosed in envelopes— yet the objective remains the same: the domination of the other. Indeed, like the classic unreality of totalitarianism, the fantastic has intruded into the real: hundred-story towers crumbling into dust together with hundreds of innocent people, airlines turning into sinister projectiles through the sky, bombs falling upon near deserted mountains to flush out maniacal religious fanatics out to destroy the capitalist world.

As one author, reflecting upon the events of 9/11 points out, the “world” of the World Trade Center with thousands of people from different nationalities under America’s aegis has been “shattered” by scores of people from “another world” shut off from the world of commerce and prosperity by thousands of grievances rooted in ethnic, ideological, or religious complaints about perceived American arrogance. Here, the peace of Arendt’s shared world has disintegrated, and in its place, a veritable “clash of civilizations” has emerged, complete with its fantasy and unreality.

Yet ironically, some say that the United States itself, the bastion of liberty, freedom and enlightened government, appears to have itself subtly subscribed to the totalitarianism of earlier days. With the breakdown of the shared world, the United States had initially closed all attempts at communication and dialogue and opted to take its stand by force, dragging the innocent Afghan people to ruin in the search of a single man. The descent into the totalitarian, therefore, is not anymore difficult to imagine. What was rooted in the old realities up to 9/11 now has found fresh visage in new geopolitical realities. Indeed, the divisions have been drawn once again, and the world is forced to take sides. The “us” and the “them” emerge in a frighteningly world-wide scale.

This is the reason Arendt’s call to forgiveness and promise take on an added significance. The redemption and escape from the spiral of totalitarianism lies in the ability to rebuild again the common world that has been fragmented by the apparent and seeming incompatibilities of American capitalism and the Islamic faith. Building a future not on forgiveness but on past wrongs does not create a foundation of pluralism that is at the heart of tolerance and religious tranquility.

This is not to say, of course, that the actions of Al Qaeda can be justified as an expression of faith. The actions of Osama Bin Laden cannot be tolerated. But to endanger the lives of thousands of innocent people to achieve the end-goal of American vindictiveness is too steep a price to pay for a fragile peace and security. Indeed, another fundamentalist could take Bin Laden’s place, and the killing continues, in this vicious cycle of fantasy begetting fantasy, ad nauseam ad infinitum.

The key, therefore, is forgiveness and promise: when two peoples embrace again the shared world of common meanings can the darkness of isolation and assimilation be banished and the cycle of vengeance and violence be broken. Indeed, the words of Arendt ring true then as it does so now: Without the possibility of forgiveness, man cannot be released from the clutches of the past, from the mistakes of totalitarianism and terrorism, as man’s capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which he could never recover; man would be a victim of its consequences forever.

First Friday Food Club: Dinelli’s

2009-09-04T21:31:00.001+08:00

At the inaugural dinner of the First Friday Food Club, Awee, Yang and I found ourselves in a quiet part of The Fort after having been turned away at another restaurant for lack of room and reservation. We had initially chosen to relocate to Je Suis Gourmand for the evening, but on the way to the NetOne Building, Awee chanced upon a small delicatessen called Dinelli’s at One McKinley Place which was not only well-lit but also did not appear to be crowded.

Not knowing what exactly to order, we found ourselves floating towards the deli displays which presented a wide array of sausages, steaks, and chesses, mostly from Australia. I had already settled into my chair and had been going through their ala carte menu when Yang, ever the meat-eater, suggested that we get a raw steak from the display and ask that it be cooked on site for our meal. It was an inspired idea.

Yang quickly chose the Australian prime rib which I similarly, although somewhat reluctantly, requested. Awee, not feeling carnivorous that evening, opted for linguini with mushrooms in red sauce, with a side-order of spicy Italian sausages and cauliflower soup. (When asked by the waiter what she wanted from the deli displays, Awee insistently said, Basta, ang gusto ko lang, sausage.)

For our part, Yang and I started with the French onion soup, and together, got a bottle of Australian shiraz to wash down the red meat. (Their selection of wines was unfortunately quite limited.)

Needless to say, and to my surprise, the steaks, cooked right from the displays, were tender and well-seasoned. Yang agreed. While the steaks were certainly not of the Antonio’s caliber (which, to my mind, are the tastiest steaks I’ve ever eaten), the quality of the meat and more importantly, the preparation and the cooking, made for a more than satisfactory steak experience. The onion soups were also similarly tasty (made with four kinds of cheese!), and I particularly liked Awee’s cauliflower cream soup, so much so that I ended up finishing her share. We finished the meal with a slice of cheesecake.

But what capped off the string of pleasant surprises was the price at which the meal had set us all back—with steaks, pasta, soup, dessert and a bottle of wine, the entire evening only cost us about P700.00 per person. None of us could argue with that.

We left Dinelli’s at about 11 o’clock, red from the wine, and full from the meat. Indeed, it was an auspicious start to the First Friday Food Club.

Dinelli’s first opened along Timog Avenue, in Quezon City, and branched out to its One McKinley location in March 2009.

G/F One Mckinley Place, 5th Avenue
Bonifacio Global City, Taguig
Tel No.: +632.703.4282 / 8560498

Dying of a Broken Heart

2009-08-27T21:26:00.004+08:00

I know that I've told many of you, over and over again, that you have to be strong following a break-up-- after all, no one has ever died of a broken heart.

Some of you believed this advice, owing, perhaps, to the logic and to the self-evidence of the statement. But I guess there is a reason why lawyers were never meant to dispense medical diagnoses, because apparently, one can die of a broken heart. And the disease has been fittingly called “broken heart syndrome.”

The affliction appears to have been first diagnosed in Japan in 1991, after a woman complained of what doctors first believed to be a heart attack. When examined more closely, the woman’s ECG was found to be uncharacteristic of a true cardiac episode, and the cardiac enzyme test that was supposed to confirm a heart attack was not found to be elevated. It was also discovered that the apex of the woman’s left ventricle had “ballooned” outward in an unusual fashion. The Japanese cardiologists thought that it resembled a Japanese octopus trap (a tako tsubo), hence called the condition takotsubo cardiomyopathy.

Studies later on showed that the syndrome was more prevalent across the globe than first believed. The studies confirmed that profound psychological stress such as grief, fear, anger, and shock could cause the acute but reversible dysfunction that occurred in the hearts of older, postmenopausal women. Patients (mostly women) suffering from the affliction were found to initially suffer from severe heart failure, and required aggressive and intensive medical care. The good news was that with appropriate care, not only did most patients survive, but that their hearts usually returned to normal functions within a few days or weeks. While the exact cause of the syndrome is not known, it is generally thought that the “ballooning” of the heart is a usual response to stress hormones produced following a severely stressful or emotional trauma.

Those of us, therefore, who have just lived through a broken heart should remember to not only be wary of medical advice dispensed by (know-it-all) lawyers, but more importantly, to be vigilant on the onslaught of a possible and quite serious medical affliction. The soundest medical suggestion, of course, is to avoid heart ache where it is even at all possible-- after all, an ounce of prevention with worth a pound of cure. But with life and living the way it is, I suppose that heart ache is inevitable, and when immanent or already present, the next best thing to do is to not only help ourselves (by perhaps keeping things in perspective), but to be kind to ourselves, as well. Indeed, if any thing, broken heart syndrome is a reminder that emotional stress and trauma can and will result in real and sometimes debilitating physical pain.

Prayer on a Sunday Night

2009-08-17T20:15:00.006+08:00

Heavenly Father,

In the oppressive silence of this evening,
as anger wells unbidden from places unvisited by grace,
teach me to forgive.

Take unsifted the memories of confusion and abandonment
that have haunted me, unrestrained,
and take them into Your eternal safekeeping,
that I may have the courage to look again at life
in hope and not in bitterness, in peace and not in hate.

Grant me, then, dear Father,
the freedom that comes with forgiveness.
Remind me always that with every vengeful thought
I nurture in my heart,
I serve only to strengthen the shackles
that bind me to the prisons of yesterday's fury--
a prison where neither hope nor light nor joy nor peace abides.

Finally, dear Father, as I pray for the courage to forgive,
and the freedom gained from forgiving,
I ask that You be present as I struggle in this journey--
For I know that I cannot forgive without Your grace,
and I cannot be free without Your love.

In the name of Him whose life has taught us to forgive,
and whose death has set us free.

Amen.

Reconnecting (Peeking Out)

2008-04-05T23:30:00.009+08:00

We took the world as given.
Cigarettes were twenty-several cents a pack,
And gas as much per gallon. Sex came wrapped in rubber
And veiled in supernatural scruples—
Call them chivalry . . . .

Psychology was in the mind; abstract
things grabbed us where we lived; the only life
worth living was the private life, and— last,
Worst scandal in this characterization—
We did not know we were a generation.

John Updike

I know that I’ve been away for a while, stuck in the daily grind of finding a life and making a living, and it’s been hard just standing still. Perhaps this really is a sign of my generation: nearing thirty, coming into our own, constantly being on the move. Almost every day, I get news of people changing jobs, getting married, moving abroad. Very few of us, in fact, are still in our first jobs out of law school. Some have even given up lawyering altogether. Others have even chosen to stake their fortunes in foreign lands. It is an unnerving experience, I think, to realize that one’s life is completely and inexorably in one’s hands.

Here’s a brief run-down of what I have since done with mine:

1. I’ve changed law offices. From the litigation firm of Poblador Bautista & Reyes, I am now an associate at R omulo Mabanta Buenaventura Sayoc & de los Angeles Law Office, one of largest law offices in the country. The firm is known for its securities, arbitration and capital markets transactions, but, strangely enough, much of my work remains in to be in litigation. I am though, fortunately, doing a number of deals, transactions and arbitrations. Needless to say, I still feel that I really don’t know anything— I get by only by the grace of God.

2. I just presently finished a semester teaching Obligations and Contracts to freshmen at the Ateneo Law School. I will also be beginning my second semester of teaching Land Titles at the FEU-La Salle MBA-JD Program in May. I also taught Transportation Law for a semester to a total of six students at the Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Pasay, all of whom were at least five years older than me and members of the Philippine National Police.

Balancing my responsibilities at the law office, where I often have to do sixteen hour days, and finding time to prepare for my classes, has been quite a challenge. And quite frankly, there are days when I feel that I am tremendously short-changing my students. Without my teaching, however, I honestly think that I would have gone nuts a long time ago. It has been quite an enjoyable experience, however (although I am sure, my students will describe my teaching as anything but enjoyable!)

3. I am now a certified Open Water Diver. I got my diver’s certification in April 2007, at Dive and Trek, in Anilao, Batangas, and since then, I have been fortunate enough to be able to dive the waters of El Nido, Palawan, Balicasag Island in Bohol, and Cebu. I can think of very few times where I can honestly say that I am entirely and completely in the moment. Being sixty feet under water, sounds muffled, moving in slow motion, it is an experience both soothing and exhilarating at the same time. Unfortunately, I have not been able to go on dives recently, owing to my very busy schedule. But the possibility of going underwater soon is a prospect that I thoroughly look forward to.

4. I’ve also had the chance to travel to quite a number of places over the past months, among them: Ankor Wat, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Hong Kong, Beijing, Puerto Galera, Boracay and Cebu City.

Through changes and travels and learnings, though, I think I’m still the same person. I little bit more jaded, perhaps, a lot more grown-up. But still the same person. It is with this thought that I am (hopefully) signing back on, and emerging (for occasional peeks) from this veritable cave of mine. Here we go. . . .

The Problem with Us

2008-04-04T23:28:00.001+08:00

I wonder if what you told me tonight was true: that the problem with people like us is that we really don’t know how to be loved. Or perhaps that we are afraid to be happy.

After all, the mutual alone-ness by which we have marked our recent days have not been for a lack of people who have tried to love us— crazily so, even when we have tried to push away. And this is perhaps our greatest consolation: that in spite of all, we are still, somehow, lovable. And so, it appears that the reason for our loneliness is actually our own doing, and the key to our happiness is actually our own choosing.

Why, then, do we still push away? Is it because we fear being too vulnerable, too close, too familiar? Is it borne out of a fear that, with proximity, they will eventually realize that all that glitters is actually not gold? Or is it because, having settled into comfortable routines, there is always that nagging possibility that there must be something more, something far better yet beyond the horizon?

You did not give me an answer, only a silence borne pregnant by what I knew we both felt. It was not hopelessness, really, but a regret and nostalgia for opportunities lost, and possibilities preempted. But there was no use sulking over the past, we both agreed. So we looked to the future, armed with what we already knew: that it was okay to be loved, and it was okay to be happy. All we needed now was our salvation: the grace of a second chance.

With Arms Outflung: Dr. Onofre R. Pagsanghan (A Brief Biography)

2008-01-07T01:48:00.001+08:00

In the face of cynicism, hopelessness, poverty and despair, and even the hard reality of failure, Mr. Onofre Pagsanghan has managed to go on and prove the world that yes, dreams really can come true. Mr. Pagsi, as he is affectionately known, has, through persistence and faith, built many beautiful things in his life, havens of light and inspiration in a world where beauty and goodness seem to be on the brink of being choked off by darkness and despair. For, in addition to his being a teacher, writer, poet and director, a man of the arts, he has always been a dreamer.

He was born on June 12, 1927, to Hipolito and Vicenta Pagsanghan. Despite their poverty, the Pagsanghans lived a happy life. He managed to enter the Ateneo High School through the kindness of their parish priest, who wrote a letter to a friend, the Rector of the Ateneo of 1941, in Padre Faura.

It was during his fourth year as a high school student that he pioneered the organization that would later be known as the Knights of the Sacred Heart. Fr. Raymond Gauff, S.J., his homeroom advisor at the time, invited him to teach Christmas carols in a boys’ club in the slums of the Holy Trinity Parish in Balic-Balic, Sampaloc.

Every Sunday, Mr. Pagsi went, teaching songs and catechism to barefoot boys in torn and dirty short pants, the sons of labanderas, carpenters, and jeepney drivers. He tirelessly made this weekly journey for the next four years, at the same time working for a degree in Education at the Ateneo College. The Knights soon became a major part of his life, so much so that even after he graduated fro college and landed a teaching position at the Ateneo High School, Mr. Pagsi stayed on as its adviser. Not long after, the Knights of the Sacred Heart would evolve from a Sunday catechism class into a parish organization that met everyday and where, aside from catechism, English grammar, composition, literature and public speaking were taught. And gradually, the Knights of the Sacred Heart grew from a handful of brawling boys into a closely knit Christian community.

Many attribute this growth to Mr. Pagsi’s extraordinary charisma, and his talent to transform even the most mundane lessons into “moments of grace.” He attributes it to the uncanny ability of work to bond people together, to unite them in the purpose of reaching a single goal. And the Knights certainly did a lot of work, from making parols to caroling all night and then rising to sing for the Misa de Gallo in the morning.

To raise funds for those boys who wished to enter the priesthood but could not because of poverty, Mr. Pagsi hit upon the idea of producing annual plays to supplement the earnings from their caroling. It was then that he began to transplant several well-known plays into Filipino, because it was the language the people of Balic-Balic were most comfortable with. The idea met with great success, with the plays being performed to a full house, or rather, a full street.

The grace that Mr. Pagsi has so often spoken of and spread for most of his life was clearly at work in the transformation of the Knights. To this date, eight boys from the Knights are ordained priests, and many more of those who began as barefoot and dirty boys brawling in the streets have made names for themselves in the world, and can now send their children off to private schooling without financial aid. Even after fifty years, the Knights still continue to form young and hopeless boys in Mr. Pagsi’s tradition of reckless, “crazy” idealism.

In 1960, Mr. Pagsi left the Knights of the Sacred Heart, closing one chapter in his life and opening the way to an entirely new dream. By this time he had been teaching for over ten years, and because of his long experience with theater, had been appointed director of the Ateneo High School Dramatics Society. Between 1956 and1964, the Society produced plays exclusively in English. The desire to change the generally apathetic attitude of people to Filipino led Mr. Pagsi and his group to start experimenting with plays in Filipino. The first of these were Julian Balmaceda’s “Sino ba Kayo?” and Soc Rodrigo’s “Paa ng Kuwago,” presented along with Who Ride on White Horses, a play on the life of Blessed Edmund Campion. With the advent of Filipino plays, the group gave itself a Filipino name: Dulaang Sibol. An old ticket gives the date of the change: April 2, 1966.

Mr. Pagsi had made real another dream, and through the realization of this dream came the outpouring of even more. Through Dulaang Sibol, Mr. Pagsi contributed much to the mainstream of Filipino culture, even revolutionizing it with his experiments with Filipino plays. Yet to the Sibolistas, those who have worked with him through the years, Dulaang Sibol and Mr. Pagsi have meant so much more. As grace transformed the Knights of the Sacred Heart, so grace transformed Sibol from a mere theater group into a family, a brotherhood. For more than a theater, Sibol has been a home and more than simply a Managing-Director, Mr. Pagsi has been a father to the many students who have come and gone over the forty-odd years the company has been in existence.

The reckless and “crazy” idealism of Mr. Pagsi gave to the Knights of the Sacred Heart he brought to Dulaang Sibol. Here, an almost insane counterculture exists, one that fully encourages and even fuels the drive of the youth to dream, to strive, for the ideal, though it may be beyond reach. Here, he teaches the power of prayer, the virtue of trust in God, and the gift of Christ’s friendship. Through his faith and persistence, this old dream merchant has sold many dreams and taught many young men to reach for the stars.

Later on, Mr. Pagsi set up a tutorial school for the underprivileged, and named it Sibol-Hesus, for it would be an extension of Dulaang Sibol, and “sprung from Christ.” Staffed by Sibol alumni who teach without salary, it provides tutorials in English and Mathematics free of charge. Crazy? Perhaps, but a happy sort of crazy, a Christ-like sort of crazy, nonetheless.

In 1966, he founded Dulaang Sibol at the Ateneo and has been its Managing-Director since. His work in Dulaang Sibol has attracted national recognition. It is high school theater with, as critic and National Artist Leonor Orosa Goquingco put it, “professional polish.” For Dulaang Sibol, he has translated Jean Annouilh’s Antigone into Filipino. He has likewise adapted Thornton Wilder’s Our Town into Doon Po sa Amin, and J.M. Barrie’s Dear Brutus into Wala sa Ating mga Bituwin. With his students he co-authored Adarna and Sa Kaharian ng Araw. Sinta!, his transplantation of Tom Jones’s The Fantasticks, with its more than 130 performances to date, is one of the longest running plays in Filipino theater history.

Under his vision and guidance, the high school students have written plays in Filipino, which critic Alfred Roces of the Manila Times called “the first important breakthrough for the national language.” Significant among these are Paul Dumol’s “Puting Timamanukin” and “Ang Paglilitis ni Mang Serapio,” perhaps the most frequently performed Filipino one-act play; and Tony Perez’s “Hoy, Boyet. . . .”

Among his former students are Nonon Padilla, Batch Saludo, Johnny Manahan, Jim Paredes, Noel Trinidad, Subas Herrero, Dindo Angeles, Leo Martinez, and Jun Urbano.

He has likewise pioneered in incorporating musical competition in the study of Filipino to stimulate greater creativity in and love for the national language. The now nationally famous “Hindi Kita Malilimutan” is the musical composition of a First Year student of his, Manoling Fransicco; the lyrics of the song are the fruit of a collaboration of Mr. Pagsi and his First Year class.

He has lectured extensively throughout the Philippines, literally from Aparri to Jolo, on education topics, specifically on “Teaching as a Vocation.”

Words are indeed too small and feeble to fully capture the great spirit of this great man. Yet he will never accept accolades of glory. He often quotes his one driving desire: “God’s Will. . . nothing more, nothing less, nothing else.” And for many of our youth, he has poured out with all his might everything he has, everything he is, everything he hopes to be, with an almost holy recklessness, for his God. In his teaching, in his writing, in his speaking, in his directing are his offerings to Christ. His faith has been nothing less than inspiring, to those he has taught.

In a world where the seeds of dreams and idealism are all too often choked off by the weeds of cynicism and despair, Mr. Pagsi has grown a veritable Eden of dreams. And, by his example, he has taught us all that yes, one can dream one’s impossible dreams, and reach one’s unreachable stars, if one has the faith and vision to see it through.

The Dangers of Partnership

2007-09-22T12:33:00.002+08:00

It was while he was preparing for one of his classes, on that dreary Saturday morning alone at the office, that he realized that what had been bothering him for the last couple of days was the fact that, somewhere, halfway around the world, she was happy.

Not that he didn’t want her to be. He, of all people, knew that she deserved it.

But what bothered him, really, was that her happiness did not include him at all. And that while she was happy wherever she was, he was all alone, here, miserable with the life that he had been living.

How did that song go, he thought: I'm the one who left you, and you're the one who's fine without me. "Was happiness really a choice?" he thought. Or did she, too, wake up each morning, and tell herself, at the beginning of each day: be brave, the best is yet to come.

Perhaps he will never know.

And then he went back to preparing for his class.

Time is the widest ocean

2007-03-18T22:03:00.000+08:00

Time is the widest ocean.

Here, standing on the shore
where I find myself stranded,
carried by waves and drifting on currents,
gazing now across the violent waters
to a past I can now almost barely see,
but only long for,
I look towards the distance:
to where we had been,
the distance we had traveled,
to what we had done to bring us where we are.

It is a nostalgia
for a place no longer there.

But time is like your leaving, too, my dear,
to the other side of world,
where shores are no strangers
to muted partings and
physical distances do not apply.

For though you may be where you are,
And I may be where I am,
We are separated by more than this ocean.

Between us and time, there is no returning.
Nor is there safe harbor to welcome me home.

Courage

2007-03-04T22:28:00.000+08:00

I am not one to trumpet my politics in public. In my mind, politics is like religion and faith: it’s often best a matter kept between God and yourself. But today, however, I will make an exception.

Last Christmas, I got to see one of my father’s cousins who was a surgeon who lived in Missouri, in the United States. I knew that he had just relocated his family back to the Philippines, where he wanted his two daughters to study and grow up. What I did not know was that he planned to run for the Philippine Senate.

He name is Dr. Martin D. Bautista.

In the last couple of days, our newspapers have been filled with articles on campaigns being mounted by candidates of every color and persuasion. Most of you will agree, however, that most of these candidates are the same ones who have brought this country to the sorry place it is now. I think they’ve had their chance. Only problem is, would there be anybody else?

To be honest, I do not know if my uncle will make a good senator. But if only for his good intentions, and his lack of political agendas, I think Dr. Bautista deserves our vote. He could be one of those “elses” our country desperately needs.

Consider the following article by Conrado de Quiros:

THERE’S THE RUB: Courage
By Conrado de Quiros, Inquirer
Last updated 00:47am (Mla time) 02/21/2007

AT about the same time that Team Unity opened its campaign in Cebu City last weekend, to much fanfare and confetti, several relative unknowns were going quietly about their business, apprising anyone interested enough to listen about their senatorial bids. Such a one was Martin Bautista, who shook hands with fellow shoppers at the Greenhills tiangge [flea market] and told them that he was running for the Senate. He is one of three doing so under the banner of Kapatiran, the anti-trapo [traditional politics] party, and if by some miracle he does make it, he says, he plans to abolish the pork barrel, uplift the lot of the poor and bring back decency to government.

The knee-jerk reaction to something like this is to be polite and say aloud, “Ah, yes, that is a very good idea,” but to think privately, “What a bunch of losers.” On the face of it, and compared to the lineups of Team Unity, GO and the various mestizo [mixed-affiliation] coalitions, Bautista and company seem no better or worse than the nuisance candidates the Comelec routinely weeds out of the garden before they can threaten to sprout. Candidates who either have batty agendas or have no chance of winning. Though as I’ve written before, in this topsy-turvy Alice-in-Wonderland country the batty agendas of the “nuisance” candidates are often worlds saner than the presumably rational ones of the “serious” candidates. I mean, who is more believable, an unemployed man who says he will spread love, peace and music to this land or a Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo minion who says he will bring justice, truth and freedom?

But to see people like Bautista as “losers” is precisely the kind of knee-jerk reaction that has wrecked the knees of this country and reduced it to a cripple groping blindly in the dark. Look at Bautista and company’s credentials and see if the wannabes in the administration and opposition tickets, individually or collectively, can hold up a candle to them. Bautista is a doctor who has worked in New York and Oklahoma for the last 17 years, who never applied for a green card, and who left a job most Filipino doctors can only dream about (they don’t even mind turning into nurses). “Life is short,” he says. “Better spend it doing something good for your country.”

His two other confreres in Kapatiran have equally sterling credentials. Adrian Sison is one of the country’s top lawyers. And Zozimo Paredes was the executive director of the presidential commission monitoring the implementation of the Philippine-US Visiting Forces Agreement who resigned his post in disgust over the Malacañang-sanctioned springing of Daniel Smith from the Makati City jail. How many of our candidates today have shown that kind of malasakit, or compassion, for the country?

I grant that the burden does not completely lie with the voters. People who present themselves to the voters have the obligation to do so in as pleasing a way as possible, short of resorting to singing and dancing, notably to tunes that reduce this exceptionally musically gifted country to the status of a retardate. They have the obligation as well to shout their heads off and be heard, to try and raise the money to advertise themselves, short of stealing or selling their souls to the devil or Fortress Trapo, whichever is worse, and not just sit back and trust in the intelligence of the Filipino voter. It’s good to trust in God, if you are a believer, but as we all know, God helps those who help themselves. That is true as well of the god of elections, who is the Filipino voter. (Of course, Arroyo has been known to mistake Garci for the voter as the god of elections, but that is another story.)

But the even bigger burden of responsibility lies with us, the public. To this day, I find truly reprehensible that concept of “winnability.” At the very least, it brings out the worst in us, driving us to vote for a candidate just because others are doing so, in the same way that lemmings throw themselves off a cliff just because others are doing so. At the very most, it robs us of a power we hold in our hands. That power is the vote. What makes a candidate “winnable” is not something he possesses, it is something we do. We vote for a candidate, he wins. We do not vote for him, he loses. It’s as simple as that. At least barring God or Garci.

Over the last couple of decades, I’ve supported candidates who I’ve thought were good for the country. Few of them won. Certainly neither of the presidential candidates I supported did: Jovito Salonga in 1992 and Raul Roco in 1998 and 2004. I’ve never regretted it. I’ve never felt I lost because of it. On the contrary, I’ve always thought it was the people who voted for the “winnable” candidate that lost, and lost big. Look at where the country is now.

In this country, the greatest courage is not shown in the face of the direst danger, it is shown in the face of the slightest ridicule. I’ve seen people risk their lives to fight tyranny but balk at endorsing “marginal” candidates, or candidates who are principled but “unwinnable,” for fear of becoming an object of scorn or laughter. Or for fear of being called naïve or simpleminded. What, it’s sophisticated to vote for an entertainer turned ersatz politician because he or she is popular? It’s brilliant to deliver this country into the hands of wheeler-dealers and/or downright crooks because they smell of money? Scorn away and laugh away, but I personally feel that when I endorse people like Martin Bautista, I win. And the country wins with me.

I wish I could say that he who laughs last laughs loudest. But I don’t know that the “unwinnable” candidates will win now, or ever. One thing I do know with absolute certainty and which applies to those who will vote for the “winnable” trapo and entertainer this May:

He who laughs first weeps longest.

At the Corner of Aurora and Gilmore

2007-02-26T21:49:00.000+08:00

Huling Upos ng Hope

Pasuntok ang subsob ng noo sa pader
na may pulang tato ng himutok,
wala akong iniwan sa pinitik kong upos
ng kahuli-hulihang Hope,
sagad na sa filter ang tira ng usok
at ngayo’y nagkikikisay na tila nakorner
sa lamat ng lunson at nagkakandaulol
sa hagupit at hambalos ng pinipilit kong ihi.
Itataktak ko pa ba O Diyos
Ang talunan kong titi?
Pasuntok ang katok sa lipunang pader,
Dapat pa bang ipagdaup
Ang laylay kong siper?

Albert Alejo, S.J.
mula sa Sanayan Lang ang Pagpatay

The bell rang, signaling the end of my Marcel class with Fr. Ferriols. I looked at my watch. It was 8:50 in the morning. I quickly gathered my things, ready to bolt out of the classroom. Restrained only by the monotonous intonation of the good priest’s Ave Maria, I prepared myself for the hurried thirty-minute trek to reach my 9:30 German Language Class at the Goethe Institut in New Manila.

I had to be outside the gates of the Ateneo by exactly 9:00 a.m. if I was not to be late. The traffic hold-up increases exponentially with every minute’s deviation from the schedule, I kept on thinking to myself. It had been a set routine for the whole summer. I did not want to be late.

I turned onto Aurora Boulevard from Doña Hemady, as scheduled, and I knew that I was going to make it. There was just one more stoplight before the Institut, and it would turn green in a moment’s notice. I sped along, crossing Gilmore Avenue, and out of the corner of my eye— there he was again, that stooped old man with a blue PVC pipe for a cane. His skin was a dirty shade of brown, and his outstretched hand looked like an immoveable fixture on his bent body, as though it had calcified in that position, and had, through time, turned into stone! I had no time to look, however. The light was green, and I had to attend class.

For three weeks now, the stooped old man with the blue PVC pipe for a cane would stand there, at exactly the same place, and in exactly the same way, as I cross the intersection of Aurora Boulevard and Gilmore Avenue. He looked, as the stoplight at the intersection, like a permanent fixture in the landscape, almost static and dead.

About two weeks ago, my family was invited to vacation with some relatives at the Tagaytay Highlands in Cavite. I had never been comfortable going there, because I felt that it was too anesthetized; I felt like something short of a hedonist. Yet I was comfortable and rested. It was difficult to argue with decadence.

We had also invited some guests to vacation with us for the weekend. The children, especially, were particularly excited since they were rarely brought for extended vacations. During the afternoon of the first day there, I decided to give them a quick tour. And so we drove from our cottage, towards the clubhouse, and on our right was a magnificent view of Taal Lake. My cousins were spellbound.

“Wow, ang ganda pala ng Pilipinas!” one of them said.

And another quite innocently, although quite poignantly replied: “Oo, para sa mga mayayaman.” Indeed, it was a statement straightforwardly made, and yet, I was taken aback by the truth of its simplicity. Ang ganda pala ng Pilipinas para sa mga mayayaman. And indeed, I knew that it was true.

That next Tuesday, I was back in Manila, and into my hectic, daily routine. The bell rang, as it has for the past weeks, and off I went to my German class in Goethe. There was the usual traffic, the usual haste, and of course, the stooped old man with the PVC pipe for a cane at the intersection of Aurora Boulevard and Gilmore Avenue. The difference that Tuesday, however, was that the light was red, and I stopped in front of him. And I looked.

It was not an easy task. Perhaps it really is human nature to recoil from suffering. Or was it something else? His toothless plea was hardly audible from the drone of the engines, and the deep furrows on his face spoke eloquently of his age. There was a pang of pity, and then of comparative self-satisfaction, and then of confusion: Ang ganda pala ng Pilipinas. . . para sa mga mayayaman.

At that moment, at the corner of Aurora Boulevard and Gilmore Avenue, I saw in the fact of that old man, the real crux of the issue of poverty in the Philippines—his existence, a silent indictment against us who choose to look away and speed by—the chasm between the poor and the rich, the critical tension between equity and equality, of getting what one works for, and getting what one deserves.

This is, no doubt, a very complex issue. Yet it is a reality that we all experience everyday, as we drive in our air-conditioned vehicles, and relax in the golf clubs of Tagaytay. But, just as we experience this social reality daily, it is, nonetheless, an experience that is anesthetized. Social justice is, for many of us, a slogan for debate and discussion, an illusory ideal meant to be grasped at. We know of the existence of the poor, and desire justice for their suffering, and yet we are unable to truly empathize with their plight. In a certain sense, we cannot help them because we are not one of them. We have made them into mere comparisons for our good-fortune, and objects of our social guilt.

We have heard statements like, “The poor make us aware of our blessings,” or, at the sight of beggars on the street, the thought that inadvertently comes out is that “you should be thankful for what you have.” Indeed, there is nothing wrong with awareness of one’s blessings or good fortune. Yet using the poor as a yardstick for one’s one prosperity perpetuates this distance between the rich and the poor even further. After all, comparisons are always relative. As a line from Erhmann’s Desiderata goes, “If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.” This attitude of comparison would also seem to imply that the life of the poor is entirely devoid of hope, wonder and love, as though only the well-to-do have a monopoly on these humanizing virtues— mistaking material poverty for spiritual emptiness.

Furthermore, the poor have also become mere objects of our social guilt. We help them not because of their inherent value as persons, but because of our discomfort. Their existence is a threat to our own security and peace of mind, so that a certain uneasiness and discomfort arising from any contact with them— we care, instead, not to look. We do not feel empathy for them. What we really feel is pity, as the poor constantly remind us of the fact that our comfortable lives are bought that the expense of their suffering. And from that pity spring an enforced action, a compulsion springing not so much from generosity as it does from guilt. We build them homes, we make them object of our charity. Not that these are very bad things; at least something is done. But still, the chasm between “us” and “them” remains. In this sense, the oft-repeated “Ubusin mo ang pagkain mo, dahil maraming naghihirap sa Pilipinas,” becomes a pale distortion of the ideal of social justice, divorcing genuine motivation from genuine action.

It is this attitude of separation, not merely of economic disparity, that is at the heart of the problem of poverty in this country. The human face of poverty has disappeared, and in its place, a dark edifice of social obligation has been constructed, cold and hopeless. Thus, in viewing the poor as mere comparisons of our good fortune, or as objects of our social guilt, the chasm between rich and poor becomes not only an economic one, but a spiritual and psychological one as well. Such a chasm of alienation and separation is, indeed, more difficult to cross.

Any genuine solution to the problem of poverty in the Philippines, therefore, involves a conscious solidarity with the poor. In directly taking part in their suffering, we eliminate this attitude of objectification, and become part of their experience, so that in knowing their hopelessness and hardship, in asking their questions and feeling their pain, we may, indeed, grow to have a genuine feeling for them, a “preferential option for the poor” that flows from a knowledge that, not only are they there, but that they are, in fact, us.

The Atenean imperative, therefore, takes on renewed urgency: Go down from the Hill. It would seem, however, that, as well-meaning all of us may seem to be, the imperative is most often left half-fulfilled. This is not because of a lack of desire. It is because of a lack of courage. Indeed, it would seem that being one with the downtrodden of this society entails not only a giving away— a sharing— but a giving up: a surrender. And that loss of comfort and dignity is not easy. Helping the poor, as one of them, will never be easy.

I myself feel like a hypocrite trumpeting solidarity as a big part of the answer to the question of poverty in the Philippines, knowing full-well that my life, and my choices have taken me far from the poor of this country. Except perhaps for the occasional outreach or charitable act during Christmas or Lent, my contact with the poor, where they are, can be characterized as fleeting, at best. And yet, perhaps, these little experiences, as all those small experiences of solidarity (if this would even be the right adjective to use), has disturbed me enough— and will continue to disturb me— away from the numbness of comparative good-fortune and objectification.

The stooped old man with the PVC pipe as a cane will perhaps never know the feeling of the cool breeze at the ridge of Tagaytay Highlands that I have learned to take for granted. And yet perhaps, in attempting to be conscious of his existence every time I look out across that peaceful landscape, in acknowledging his value and attempting to understand his suffering, I know that, in some strange and blessed way, I become inextricably bound to him, and all like him, in our common struggle for greater prosperity, humanity and hope.

* * *

Am I still disturbed today? Are we still disturbed?

The Wisdom of Job

2007-01-01T00:55:00.002+08:00

Doing my year-in-review in Loyola this afternoon, I realized that notwithstanding the many losses and missteps of the past year, I can still say, in all honestly, that 2006 was a good year. Not that it was particularly memorable— if passing the 2005 Philippine Bar is not memorable enough; rather it was good because it was consistent and comfortable, with the occasional quiet moment of redemption and surprise.

In a very real sense, 2006 marked off for me the pattern which my near future is to inadvertently follow, that is, weeks of work, teaching, the occasional dinner or celebration, and lots of quiet and solitary moments of loneliness and joy. And the judgment, on top of all the seeming ennui or pathos (depending on which side of the bed I wake up on) is that this pattern isn’t really all that bad.

Indeed, 2006 taught me how to be more patient, particularly with myself, and where my life is going. In the times I find myself sitting in the office, slaving away at a pleading at ten o’clock in the evening, wondering whether it was really what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, I realized that this, too— this doubt, confusion, boredom, and elation— was all part of the journey. And what life is asking of me now is to experience this, fully, the best way I know how. All this, no doubt, will have a point.

Not that all has been smoke and mirrors. On the contrary, in certain quiet, blessed silences, there have also been moments of redemption and consolation, when, somehow, I was given a glimpse— or perhaps, more precisely, a feeling— of eternity: that giddy expectation that something more, something far better is waiting just beyond the horizon.

It is all just a matter of time. Or better yet: that the best is yet to come.

And so, tonight, of all nights, I respond in faith, that though things may not be too clear to me at the moment, at the turning of yet another year, “no doubt, the universe is unfolding as it should.” And like the good man Job who attempted, without success, to understand God’s inscrutable ways, I too have the courage to pray: The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the Lord’s name.

May your 2007 be filled with the same hope and the same faith.

* * *

Coupled with the thankfulness for the past, I sense that this coming year will be a year of choices for many of us. No doubt, we are at an age where many of us face difficult crossroads, both exciting and terrifyingly permanent. Marriage. Commitments. Career choices. Leavings and good-byes. May we, therefore, choose wisely. May we, most of all, choose what will truly make us happy and what will truly give us peace.

A prosperous and meaningful new year to all!

Prison Break

2006-12-20T22:59:00.000+08:00

Now I know the bitter tears,
The dull despair, the frantic rages,
The sleep-destroying hopes and fears
Of fish in bowls and birds in cages.

After Two Months in Prison,
by Fr. Horacio dela Costa, S.J.

They warned me early enough. No matter what I may think, they told me, it was still a prison that I was visiting. Sure, they were children, many still in their teens. But they had committed crimes, and they had to be punished for it— student of law that I was, I understood exactly what they meant. But coming to the National Youth Receiving Center that Sunday morning, I felt that the warnings were hardly necessary, because everything around me, even the very air I breathed, told me that I was in a prison. And the fact that there were children behind bars only made the experience all the more poignant.

It began with an invitation from a Jesuit friend, who had been assigned to work with the children confined at the Center as part of their apostolate work and formation. Wanting to do something different (and perhaps more meaningful) this Christmas, I accepted the offer and decided to involve my students at the law school with me. Why not hold a Christmas party for the children at the Center, I suggested. Why not spend an afternoon with them?

Initially, I was concerned about the security of my students. The children at the Center were, after all, not “harmless” orphans or abandoned toddlers— they were, for all intents and purposes, detention prisoners, charged for the commission of crimes, some even involving rape, homicide or murder.

I understand now, of course, that it was an unfounded and exaggerated fear, a product more of my overactive imagination and over-zealous sense of protectiveness. They can take care of themselves, a fellow faculty member told me. Don’t be too Atenean to the Ateneans, some even said, referring to the Ateneo’s penchant for “sheltering” too much its students. Ivory towers have no place in the true practice of law, they chided.

And so, brushing these concerns aside, we began preparations in earnest. Pleasantly, these were not at all complicated: I simply divided the class into committees and assigned them specific tasks for the event: a group would take care of the entertainment, another for preparing the food, another to purchase and package the Christmas give-aways, and finally, another to gather old clothes. Following some meetings and a flurry of e-mail messages over the span of two weeks, all preparations were completed in time for the Sunday morning activity.

We departed from the Ateneo Rockwell campus at around eight o’clock in the morning, in a convoy of vehicles, to the Center located a short distance from the City Hall of Manila. The children were hearing Mass when we arrived; and from the receiving area, I could see them seated neatly in rows of monoblock chairs.

It was not until almost an hour later, when we were allowed to assemble at the hall where mass was previously celebrated. At first, I was surprised at the small number of children waiting: we were told there were at least one hundred and fifty children who would participate in the activity; there were only around fifty seated along one side of the room. I was told, however, that many more would come; they were merely being taken out of their cells on the first floor of the Center (we were on the second).

Out of the window, I could see the rest of the children being prepared for the activity, squatting in long straight lines, like a scene out of a movie. From the second floor hall where we were waiting, I could make out their cells surrounding the central courtyard, and I could see that some children remained inside (some were not allowed to participate as punishment for previous infractions). It was not until later when I would finally get to see the cells first-hand.

Through a spiral staircase ascending from the courtyard, through a barred and locked steel door, they were herded into the hall, where they bunched with those already in the room. Looking at them all, I had to consciously tell myself that these children are now being prosecuted for the commission of various crimes; that some of them had raped and even killed. This uncomfortable realization, however, was short-lived, because from the moment they were split up into groups and interacted with their ates and kuyas from the Ateneo, they became what, I suppose, they really are, notwithstanding the prison bars: they became, quite simply, kids.

All through the morning, they talked and laughed and even danced. They made cheers, played games, and joked with each other and with their ates and kuyas. Watching on the sidelines, I wondered how these children dealt with this dichotomy of their existence, this polarity between prison and childhood. It was an existence that few of us, hopefully, will ever get to experience, yet it was a reality that, hopefully also, would disturb us in our comfort zones.

And so, after distributing lunch and their Christmas give-aways, it was time for the children to leave and return to their cells. Free time, I suppose, was over. They left as they had arrived, in long straight lines, down through the spiral staircase, onto the courtyard below.

We waited a few minutes for the children to be herded back to their cells, and we were given the chance to see them where they were at: inside their cells, before we said good-bye. Thus, in a crude line of our own, we were guided to the first floor of the Center, into the gut of the building, where the children were kept.

There were four or five cells around that courtyard, and into them, were crammed the child-detainees. The cells were bare save for native cots and the smell of the nearby latrine. Fans whirred idly in each of the cell’s ceilings, while bars, old and rusty, marked their expanse of freedom. Some children were seated on the floor, others standing with arms hanging out the bars. I know of no other way to describe the sight, except by saying that the children looked like animals in cages. You could hardly tell that these were the same kids who, moments earlier, were laughing and joking and playing. You could not even tell this from their faces, which were now blank and expressionless, borne, perhaps of the boredom that marked their nights and days. The distinction, it appears, has become blurred even to them. I noted that not a few called out to their kuyas and ates filing past, greeting them good-bye, as though it was the most normal thing in the world.

And then, we left.

I am not sure what my students took home with them that afternoon following our visit to the Center. Perhaps some were glad to have been able to perform a good deed for Christmas. It was, after all, what Christ himself prescribed: when I was in prison, you visited me. Others, perhaps, were disturbed at the condition of the children’s detention, or the dissonance between the lofty provisions of law and the reality beyond it. Or others still may have felt the stirrings of that dark and unnamable discomfort deep down in the gut, the same one that characterizes the beginning of passion or action: that something is wrong and that something has to be done.

As for me, it was not these things that I thought of as I left the Center that afternoon. Rather, it was the awareness of, and the appreciation for, the simple pleasure of being able to walk out of an open door. Perhaps this realization is a bit too simplistic, if not even a bit selfish. But, indeed, it is an act too often taken for granted: the ability to leave when one wishes; the ability to go where one chooses. As I was leaving the Center, I felt many things, some unarticulated and others still nascent. But one sure thing I felt was this: that I was glad that I could walk back out into the world again, and that I was not one of those who would need to be left behind.

Mirando su Cara

2006-12-18T00:59:00.000+08:00

Se atan la cara y el discurso. La cara habla. Habla, es en esto que hace posible y comienza todo el discurso. Acabo de rechazar la noción de la visión para describir la relación auténtica con la otra; es discurso, y, más exactamente, la respuesta o la responsabilidad que son esta relación auténtica.

Emmanuel Levinas, El Etica e Infinito

Aparte de la inconveniencia de ser en la compañía de cada una y otra, él realizó que él no sentía la misma expectativa, agitación u obligación que marcaron sus encuentros pasados. Quizás era el silencio o la distancia, o el finalidad de las palabras habladas antes, que salido no más para discutir. Lo que era, él conocía que esta inconveniencia que él se sentía era solamente temporal, una inconveniencia que disolvería tan pronto como la tarde terminara, tan pronto como él consiguiera en su coche para ir. Fuera de vista, fuera de la mente.

Es igual la falta de memoria entrenada que lo ha mantenido sano con los días y los meses que seguían su separación. De hecho, es una falta de memoria entrenada que tiene llegó a ser menos y menos difícil como los días pasaron con la merced. Esto significó solamente que él finalmente conseguía “librado” de ella, de su olor, de su presencia, de su memoria. Él no recordó su cara. Pronto, él se olvidará de muchas otras cosas. Y él puede finalmente vivir normalmente otra vez.

Pero él sabía que él no estaba allí todavía. Pronto, y lentamente. Para mientras que él sabía que se puede quedarse en el mismo cuarto con ella, o quizá hablando con ella, o iguale quizá hacer su amigo, él sabía que él todavía no podría mirarla sin la sensación de la misma dificultad o lamentarlo se sentía siempre que él estuviera alrededor de ella. Y él también no podría tolerarla que lo miraba. Él temió eso con estos vistazos más leves, esta seguridad frágil y construida la suya lo desenredaría y dejaría vulnerable y perdido con todo otra vez.

Y por eso, él deseó decirle (como si su entero que es quemado en estas mismas declaraciones) que cuando se encontrieron en la calle, o se vieron en las fiestas, nos dejó no mirar uno a otro. Él no significó ningún desacato por esto. Ella no necesita preocuparse, él podría hablar con ella, podría reir a ella, iguala quizá podría decir una broma (de la manera distraída él era siempre que sea nervioso o afectado). Pero en todo el esto, él no la miraría, y él quisiera que ella no lo mirara. No deben mirar uno a otro. No todavía. A fin de lleguen a estar vivos de nuevo al uno a otro. Él era seguro que ella convendría: viviendo con un fantasma es bastante difícil.

Giving Thanks

2006-11-30T22:05:00.000+08:00

In the United States, the fourth Thursday of November is celebrated as Thanksgiving Day. On this day, Americans everywhere come home and pause to give thanks for the blessings they have received in the year.

Justice Paul E. Pfeifer traces this tradition to the European Pilgrims who arrived in America from Holland in November 1620 following a grueling sixty-five day voyage across the Atlantic, in an undersized, overcrowded boat called the Mayflower.

The Pilgrims’ first winter in the New World, Justice Pfeifer narrates, nearly did them in. Of the one hundred ten settlers, less than fifty made it through to spring. Those who did survive faced the challenge of carving out a settlement in the wilderness.

Thankfully, spring brought a reprieve and important new allies: the Wampanoag tribe. The Wampanoag taught them how to raise crops and hunt game in the forest, so that when October rolled around, their bountiful harvest provided enough food to carry them through the winter.

In thanksgiving for this bounty, they invited their Indian friends to a feast, and the American tradition of Thanksgiving was born.

In 1974, President Marcos attempted to transplant this tradition by declaring September 21 of each year as a National Day of Thanksgiving. Perceptive Filipinos of that time, however, saw through the dictator’s ruse: by setting the holiday on the same date as the declaration of Martial Law, many realized that this was merely a ploy to obscure the repressive character of his dictatorship.

Thus, the tradition never quite caught on.

Still, while Filipinos do not have a formal day of thanksgiving like the Americans, the many festivals celebrated throughout the year in various localities in the Philippines demonstrate the innate impulse of our people to give thanks. I am immediately reminded of the Pahiyas Festival in Lucban, Quezon, where, every May 15, locals deck their homes with the products of their toils, in thanksgiving to their patron saint, San Isidro Labrador, for the year’s good harvest.

Whether in the United States or in the Philippines, therefore, whether on a definite holiday or in local feasts, the need to give thanks is universal. What Justice Pfeifer said of the American tradition, therefore, can be said of thanksgiving feasts everywhere: “Thanksgiving is a great holiday because it is so inclusive. This is a holiday that disregards religious affiliation or ethnic background. It is a holiday that gives all people a pause to gather, ponder and give thanks for life’s blessings.”

And so I do the same.

* * *

On this day, of all days, this is what I give thanks for:

Rain.
Good friends.
Family.
Sunsets at Loyola.
Pollock talks.
Walks.
Silences.
Firsts.
Conversation.
Stars.
Blue skies.
Memories.
Long drives.
Poetry.
Philosophy.
Song.
Laughter.
Beaches.
Long weekends.
Prayer.
You.

[You know who you are.]

No Exit: Random Musings on the Law School Experience

2006-11-09T09:40:00.000+08:00

[This article was published in the June 2003 online issue of BusinessWeek Magazine. Teaching first year law students brings me back to those days when all these observations were yet to be something learned and lived. I therefore post this article for their education.]

Perhaps lawyer jokes tell it all. The most recent one I’ve heard poses the following question: what do you call ten thousand lawyers shackled at the bottom of the sea?

Answer: a very good start.

In this post-Estrada, revolution-giddy society, lawyers and the legal profession have become more and more the subject of scrutiny under our exacting social microscope— and the verdict does not look all that rosy. Indeed, the impeachment trial, the assumption of GMA to the presidency, and the subsequent Estrada criminal cases, coupled with the recent decisions of the Supreme Court involving PEA-Amari, Meralco, and Piatco have given those who would otherwise be indifferent to these seeming legal gobeldygook a taste of what appears to be the job of every lawyer: turning white into black and turning black into white.

Early on in his legal training, the law student himself is exposed to this seeming duplicity of lawyers and the law. At first blush, this duplicity often leaves him confused and disheartened. But as he grows in his legal education, he will come to realize that if indeed it is true that the lawyer turns black into white and white into black, it is only because he is, first and foremost, called to be an advocate: one who speaks that others may be heard. This is not argumentation for argumentation’s sake; rather, it is so that the judges and justices— those who have been given the immense responsibility to rule upon a controversy— might study every side to an issue, every argument, however absurd, in order that they may reach a fair and equitable judgment. This is the power advocacy at work; and it is a lesson that must early on be learned by any law student worthy of his salt.

Of course, advocacy is only one of the many subtle lessons a law student picks up in his time in the law school. There is also the lesson of humility. All law students will testify: law school is a thoroughly humbling experience. Indeed, the fact that one graduated with so-and-so award from this so-and-so school does not at all matter. Everyone starts on equal footing. Among the important events which contribute to this realization: 1) Everyone screws up in recitation. 2) Everyone flunks an exam or two. 3) Everyone, at some point or another, feels the utter powerlessness of having one’s professional life entirely in the law professor’s hands.

Often, survival is a simple question of luck and pure circumstance: such as reading thirty-four of the thirty-five cases assigned for the class, and the professor calling on you to recite on the thirty-fifth case. Many feel bad and stupid after the first few times, but most live with the humiliation and embarrassment. It is all just part of the game.

Then, there is also the lesson of balancing the academic and the personal. Studying law, after all, is hard enough without the jealous barkada, the demanding girlfriend, or the nagging mother intruding into the student’s already cluttered sphere of thought. Add to this the classmates whose personalities are so diverse and opposing, that many sometimes feel that everyone is just being tolerant of everybody else. A friend of mine put this in the following terms: “In law school, there are no boys and girls— only brats. It’s like high school all over again, but without the innocence.”

Of course, it is best to take this observation with a grain of salt. But I think it speaks a very important truth. Indeed, being placed in a high-pressure situation, in an enclosed space, with the same people, five, even, six-days a week, could understandably bring out the worst out of anyone. The law school classroom, after all, is really a lesson in pop sociology: a veritable fishbowl, where everybody is free to observe every body else, at all angles at all times. In such a small community, it would appear that the only pastime between classes and cases seems to be gossiping about who’s dating whom, and who did what to whom. If one is not careful, therefore, human relations in law school could indeed turn into a true Sartean nightmare: No Exit, where hell is really other people.

Finally, there is the most important lesson (I think) of living with disillusionment. As early as the first semester of their first year, the law student is reminded of the nobility of the legal profession, and the majesty of the Rule of Law. Rightly so, for indeed, the legal profession is noble and the Rule of Law is majestic. Unfortunately, however, the reality of the matter does not quite measure up. Pushing forward, the law student realizes that the profession is not as glamorous as is perhaps portrayed in Ally McBeal, The Practice, or most recently, in the Estrada Impeachment trial. Professors are wont to remind their students that a good part of a lawyer’s life is stuck in the office, typing pleadings, and following-up on cases. And add to this the incompetence of some judicial officers and the blatant corruption in some courts.

The perceptive law student, therefore, is left with a stale taste in the mouth, wondering, half-crazed (due to the volume of legal material before him), whether the nobility of the legal profession and the majesty of the Rule of Law is truly any match against the silent, if not twisted, eloquence of the one-thousand peso bill. Indeed, there is nothing more vexing than the discordance between concept and reality, and it is this metaphysical unease between the Rule of Law and the Reality of Legal Practice that the serious law student faces everyday of his legal education; one that will surely vex him as he goes forward into the practice law.

Lest I be misquoted, let me say that there is indeed love in the study of law, as there is nobility, friendship and loyalty. But coming down from the lofty perches of ideals to where, in the world, there indeed seems to be no exit, there also exists corruption, betrayal, and dishonesty. Law school is the preparation where all these realities begin to exist for the law student; it is the microcosm— and a very convincing one, at that— of the real legal world. Law school, therefore, becomes the annealing ground upon which the advocacy, humility, balance and disillusionment first find expression, and which will, in the end, determine the kind of lawyer— good or bad— the law student is to become.

Ideally, then, the law school experience should be considered as one long examination of conscience. It is a venue where the would-be lawyer is given the opportunity to test his limits of compromise, and where ultimately, he may also discover his non-negotiables. Hopefully, at the end of this search, he may find, among these non-negotiables, the principles of truth, justice, and fear of God. If not, then we will all be in deep trouble, for not only would the lawyers find themselves shackled at the bottom of the sea, but our whole country as well.

Cats

2006-10-22T16:32:00.000+08:00

Cat Montage
Tagaytay City, 22 October 2006.

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have three different names.

First of all, there's the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey -
All of them sensible everyday names.

There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter -
But all of them sensible everyday names.

But I tell you, a cat needs a name that's particular,
A name that's peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?

Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum -
Names that never belong to more than one cat.

But above and beyond there's still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover -
But the cat himself knows, and will never confess.

When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name

The Naming of Cats, by T.S. Eliot

Glimpses

2006-09-10T23:10:00.000+08:00

On the first sunny Sunday afternoon after nearly two weeks of daily downpours, I found myself, quite predictably, at the Ateneo campus in Loyola, taking some moments of peace and quiet between writing pleadings and helping out with the preparations for the 2006 Bar Exams.

Sitting there in my car parked along Xavier Hall, I watched as a young father played ball with his young son at Bellarmine field, while his young wife, the child’s mother, sat on a picnic mat nearby, watching. The child dutifully ran after the ball with faltering steps, and upon reaching it, kicked it, but without much strength, so that he had to run after the ball again, and kick it again, for it to reach his waiting father, now seated beside his young wife. And the child ran back to where his parents were, to the waiting arms of his young mother who embraced him, the same one who was leaning her head on her young husband’s arm.

Maybe it was the serenity of the moment that caught me off-guard. Or maybe it was because, for the first time in a long time, I saw what joy was actually like.

Sitting there in my car, on the first sunny Sunday afternoon after nearly two weeks of daily downpours, I knew, with distinct clarity, what I wanted. I knew what I wanted to become. And I told myself what that wise old Jesuit used to tell me: “Have faith, that the God who placed this desire in your heart, will not disappoint.”

Proposals and Witnesses

2006-09-03T21:02:00.000+08:00

The basis of all testimonial knowledge under our Rules of Evidence is personal knowledge. This means that only those persons who have personal knowledge of the facts they are called to testify on are qualified to be placed on the witness stand. Personal knowledge means that the witness is able to testify on matters that were derived from his own senses and perceptions; personal knowledge means, in short, that the witness was actually there.

I remembered this interplay between a witness’s testimony and the need for his personal knowledge when I was listening to a friend tell me about the movie Shall We Dance? and why she wanted to soon get married. In the movie, Susan Sarandon, on analyzing why people get married, said:

We need a witness to our lives. There’s a billion people on the planet. . . . I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you are promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things . . . . all of it, all of the time, every day. You are saying, “Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness.”

The other day, I learned that a friend from Dulaang Sibol finally proposed marriage to his girlfriend of six years. Naturally, it was made on the Dulaang Sibol stage, complete with lighting, music and much drama. Under the pretext of picking up his youngest brother from Sibol, my friend led his soon to be fiancée into the theater and asked her to wait on the stage as he left to look for his brother. No sooner did my friend leave than the lights in the theater began to dim, except for a single spotlight in the middle of the stage. The sound of guitar and voices soon followed. It was my friend's Sibol batchmates, serenading her with, (what else?) a Sibol love song:

Ikaw ang mahal ko, hindi ang suot mo.
Ikaw ang mahal ko, hindi ang mabibili mo.
Hindi ang mga bagay-bagay na bumabalot sa 'yo.
Ang tunay na ikaw sa kaloob-looban mo,
Ang kailaliman ng 'yong pagkatao.
Ang ikaw na tunay at totoo: ikaw ang mahal ko.

Ikaw ang mahal ko, pati pangarap mo.
Ikaw ang mahal ko, pati mga pagkabigo.
Pati ang mga adhikain na tagos sa 'yong dugo.
Ang tunay na ikaw na sa iba'y tinatago,
Ang kaluluwa mong hindi maglalaho.
Ang ikaw na ikaw, Aparri mo't Jolo:
Ikaw ang mahal ko.

And then, at the opportune moment, out from the darkness she did not quite know from where, my friend finally emerged, with a red rose in his right hand, and a ring in his pocket. He stood in front of her, kissed her lightly on the cheek, gave her the rose, and knelt. She was freaked out, at first. She even tried to run away. And yet when she realized what was happening, she chose to stay. And in that choosing, I suppose, she meant to stay forever. Inextricably, forever.

When I asked my friend what he felt as he was walking towards her, kneeling in front of her, slipping the ring on her finger, he said that it was the most natural feeling in the world, that he wasn’t at all scared, of doubtful, or even anxious. If anything, he was excited at how she would react. And he got exactly the reaction he wanted.

“Everything just seemed so vivid for me,” he concluded. “Like I knew I was really there. Like I knew I was really in the moment. There’s nothing like it.”

I smiled. It was a job well done, and it was a proposal long coming. And now, remembering Susan Sarandon and Shall We Dance, I knew that my friend would not only be qualified to testify, but that he would be a very credible witness.

Interestingly, the Greek word for “witness” is μάρτυρια (marturia), from which the English word “martyr” is derived. I think that there is some poetry in this: that a witness, by placing himself before the bar of scrutiny, stakes his very being on the truth of what he will testify. Even if sometimes, it means that he will have to suffer. Even if sometimes, it means that he will have to die. I guess such is the responsibility of being a witness, especially to another person’s life: for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do they part.

Recuerdo

2006-08-13T21:56:00.000+08:00

Broken Face
Originally uploaded by Wiro's Site

Sa gabi, nahuhulog ang mga alaala
na gaya ng mga piraso
ng nabasag na salamin
nagkalat sa sahig,
pinupulot isa-isa,
pilit ipinagsasama’t binubuo:
mga pira-pirasong luha
na inipon at kinuyom
habang sabay nitong sinasalo
ang maruming liwanag
ng makalimuting gabi.

At sa pagtatagpo ng mga bubog,
dahan-dahan ding nabubuo
ang nagmamasid sa atin
mula sa loob ng baság na salamin:
tayo rin, pira-piraso’t baság.

Nakabubuti rin naman
ang mahiwa
ng matalim na bubog ng alaala:
ang hilaw at nagdurugong laman
ay mabuting paalala
na tayo nga pala’y buhay pa.

Changing Roles

2006-08-11T22:15:00.000+08:00

Strangely shifting roles for the first time— from student to teacher— I often catch myself gazing out into the sea of expectant faces, thinking to myself, Am I getting my point across? Am I looking stupid? Do they even have an idea that I actually don't know what I'm doing? It's an interesting feeling sitting now at the other side of the classroom for the first time, not anymore a student, but not quite yet a teacher.

But make no mistake about it: there is nothing more exhilarating than teaching. It's the only thing that gets me through the ennui of the week.

Driving home from class today, looking foward to a quiet evening of DVD's and probably a late-night stroll in Loyola, I was reminded of an essay written by noted Literature Professor D.M. Reyes of the Ateneo.

So, do you remember who your teachers were? I do.

* * *

Easy to Forget

D.M. Reyes

The door that leads to our office rattles a bit when it opens. It has been my experience that, now and then, a student walks in with a shifty look on his face. Glassy-eyed, he would glance from partition to partition. When he figures out that the office is quiet, with most of the teachers having stepped out to meet their classes, he would clear his throat and ask, as if addressing the burning bush in Sinai: “Excuse me, I'm looking for my teacher.”

“But who’s your teacher?” Out of habit I’d rise, demanding to know the teacher’s name, so I could scrawl a message or hand the student some paper to write on.

The replies that I get reveal such astounding honesty. For one, they tell you that young people don’t lie when they watch with their eyes. Then again, they tell you how these students do have the talent in describing a character with precise words, hitting the bull’s eye. Watching them fumble, I do get amused sometimes. I even lose a little tact when I tell them: “Oh-oh, watch out. You’ll be in trouble for saying that.”

Why not, when they can’t remember their teacher’s name, getting quite bold enough, only to blurt out: “He looks kind of undersized,” or “A little too fat and she's fond of wearing halters,” or “He talks about pearl shakes all the time,” and once, even a candid “’Yon pong medyo bading, sir.”

My own effort to remember teachers and know them by name had been prodded quite early on. The memory keeps company with Miss Aruba being our class favorite when Miss Universe was first staged in Manila or the nuns calling off classes so that the entire school could cheer for Muhammad Ali as the nation hosted Thrilla in Manila.

This was in Grade I. One rainy day, our teacher quite suddenly mused about her former students. She must have been at work for some time then for she spoke about pupils who had grown up, gone to college, and finished either as a doctor, a dentist, or simple gone abroad, then promptly forget her.

She taught them to cipher and to sing, drilled them their Judys and Johns, their first action words of “we look and see, we work and play, we come and go.”

Now, none of them remembers her. She sighed and made us swear not to forget her— Mrs. Juanita Vigilia who taught us about Judy and John skipping rope and attending the Holy Hour, their dog Spot after which her own dog had been named— the one that she came to school puffy-eyed about one day, because the dog had run away or thieves had put it in the sack and carried it away the night before.

Even today, I can still recite the names of all the class advisers who took care of me from kindergarten and all through high school. The compelling need to remember comes with the guilt, as if it would mean breaking Mrs. Vigilia’s heart, she who asked to be remembered.

A score of years later, with my own classes of college literature and composition to fret about, I often see students struggling to describe their teachers, flipping the roster briskly and back on the bulletin board outside the office, thinking hard and still missing the name.

In “The Book of Remembrances” the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano begins his story by going back to the etymology of remembrance. He takes the word recordar, roots it back to the Latin word re-cordis, which means “to pass back through the heart.”

Finishing from grade school, I had one other teacher who taught me this true worth of remembering. At a young age, I had been enrolled quite eagerly for piano lessons. My brother and I trooped to the house of the music teacher, a gypsy-like woman who had expressive eyes and fair skin acquired from her Chinese forebearers. The lessons were all the more memorable as she taught me between house chores— out there in the garden, washing a piece or two of her children's soaked clothes in her basin of sudsy water or halting the furious scales so I could sip a bowl of nilaga, just to know if she had seasoned their lunch all right.

But lessons with he were cut short when I won a piano scholarship in school, the nuns all too happy to take me in because I could read the notes fast enough and keep time when I played. My mother accompanied me to ask permission from Mrs. Guiland— that hence, I would train at the music studio in school, play the piano and the electric organ, too, so I could accompany the masses in church. When I finished grade school, the church gave me a medal for being the youngest member of the worship team, a medal for so many mornings of liturgical service.

The graduation was held in church. At the end of the ceremonies, while we were posing for photographs with the nuns and the priests, a young girl tugged at my starched shirt, holding out a sweet garland of Japanese magnolias. “This is from Nanang— Mrs. Guilang, I mean,” she was quick to say, having figured out that I could not guess who sent the flowers. “We’re at the back, you see,” she explained, smiling before she turned away.

No pictures were taken with Mrs. Guilang because we could not find her. But my mother told me to wear the garland, even as one of the teachers looked miffed and fussed abut the blooms obscuring the medal. Yet my mother insisted and said “Wear it proud because if not for Mrs. Guilang, you would have no medal today.”

Between Mrs. Vigilia and Mrs. Guilang, there’s a blazing memory of many other teachers whose names are not easy to forget because they have something, by way of a gesture that shone and traveled back to the heart. And no one would be jealous, I tell myself, because remembering them, there is always a pleasant memory to accompany the sound of their name.

And now, after more than a decade of my own tireless chalk-talk, do I write because I have looked more deeply, a student-turned-teacher quite honestly acknowledging my own brief need to be remembered? Or do I remember them because I, too, have sat at the room's other end and seen for myself that endless mass of youthful faces— an analogue to time's harsh passage beheld year after year after year?

I am writing this piece with small hands and trembling little fingers, a present of spidery letters with ink smudges here and there— memory’s river running on and flowing back to the heart— for Mrs. Vigilia and those countless others who ask not to be forgotten.

Questions and Answers

2006-08-04T18:24:00.000+08:00

There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life. There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: ‘He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.’

from “Man’s Search For Meaning” by Viktor Frankl

It's been over eight months since I started with my first job last January 2 and four months since I passed the Philippine Bar. In the rare chances that I get to chat with friends, both old and new, over coffee, or perhaps even dinner, as we marvel at how fast the past months have quickly sped by, we find ourselves inevitably drifting towards that “overwhelming question”: “So, are you happy with your work?”

Sitting here on a Friday evening, after most everyone in the office has already left and I waiting only for the traffic to lighten outside (with nowhere to go but home on this tired Friday night), I guess I can honestly answer that question with a sincere “yes”. But it is a "yes" that is at once certain and qualified, as happiness is, after all, often just a question of degrees.

I am now suddenly reminded of a YM conversation with a fellow batchmate from the University of the Philippines working in an Intellectual Property Firm in Ortigas. I reproduce from the archive a portion of that conversation:

mka0124 (1/26/2006 11:56:16 AM): r u enjoying work?
peej_bernardo (1/26/2006 11:56:53 AM): Define enjoying? If you mean, enjoying like, I'm jumping up and down, I'm in Boracay, or holding hands with a person I really care about, then of course not!You know what I realized? I realized that I don't think my work will ever define me. I mean, I think the best description for it is: I don't think I'll take it too serious, as perhaps I did with my studies, or some *other* stuff. I mean, I'll do my best, I'll turn in the required pleading, but at the end of the day, it's not what I live my life for. And until I find that something or someone to live that life for, I don't think I truly will consider myself *enjoying.*
mka0124(1/26/2006 12:18:12 PM): Thanks for concretizing what I am experiencing rin. . . looking for something more, feeling restless. . . .

I think the reply captures precisely the sentiment I feel at the closing of my first month of work. While I really do not have anything to complain about— work, so far, has been pleasantly exciting— it is, strangely enough, somewhat empty and purposeless. Departing from the initial satisfaction of job well done and the exhilaration of a challenge adequately addressed, the futility of the endeavor cannot but stare back at me from the burdened page: what the hell am I doing all of these things for?

I guess it is a uniquely human yearning, this want of trying to find meaning behind things: why we do what we do, why we are where we are. After all, they say that the most difficult question to answer is not the who, what, or when, but the why. The question forces us to look deeper into things, and sometimes, looking deeper, we do not like what we eventually get to find.

This rather impassive attitude towards work, however, did not surprise me at all, because I knew that while I was driven enough to fulfill whatever tasks I had to do in the best way I knew how, I had nothing more to prove. Not that I had achieved anything great or even noteworthy— no, in all humility, no. Rather, it is probably because I know that somehow, someway, I have made something of myself at age twenty-seven. But ever the restless soul that I am, something remains to be missing. Something remains to be done. More than a nagging emptiness, it's really an impatience with the universe to finally reveal to me: what's this all about? [What was it that Coelho wrote? “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”]

Yes, yes, I know that this is but another manifestation of the creeping daily realization that one life has indeed irretrievably ended, and that another, perhaps more uncertain one, has irrevocably begun. Indeed, the rest of my life has gotten me caught up in everyday “matters of consequence,” that I am left dumbstruck at how the minutes and the hours and the days have gone by so quickly, without me having the chance to quite understand any of it, without me having the chance to find any meaning in it. And as of yet, I am still struggling.

Will I even ever find it?

So I trudge off to my daily routine that is both comforting and oppressive, swept up in the adrenalin of court appearances and client calls, but in the silence of the end of the day, still somewhat diminished by the seeming insignificance of the whole exercise. Indeed, I now understand how numbness can be a refuge to many of those condemned to the work-a-day-world, and it is something that I useful in getting through the day. Indeed, I tell myself: Do not yield to the disillusionment. Have faith, this will have a point. Indeed, whether or not it is clear to me or not, “no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.” As Rilke wrote [those epochal words constantly repeated by the lost and the hopeful]:

Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves . . . . Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then, gradually, without noticing it, living along some distant day into the answers.

Standing on a Bridge

2006-07-17T13:44:00.000+08:00

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

From The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus.

He left the coffee shop as it started to rain. Clutching his files tightly under his arm— heavier, it seemed than how he had remembered— he darted across the street to the foot of the bridge in order to find shelter from a downpour which had all afternoon been threatening to fall. He cursed under his breath as his manila envelopes were spattered with water.

Why the hell did I park the car on the other side, he thought. Stupid.

He lingered a moment over the railing, watching as the pavement began to turn from a dusty gray to a shiny black, as vehicles below sped by, leaving the sound of splashing water crushed between tire and concrete. Immediately, he was mesmerized by the rhythmic rush of life that happened beneath his feet, and wondered what it was like to actually have somewhere to go. And then, as though by instinct, the thought of mortality again flashed in his mind, as though the pavement below were some sordid salvation. He dismissed the thought with a cynical snicker.

You won't get off that easy, he thought. He remebered what it was again that the philosopher said: “It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm— this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.”

He knew that it was that this why which stared at him straight from the pavement, a why which he did not quite now know the answer. At least not yet.

The urgency of his tasks, however, called him back to himself, so that he knew that what time he had to consider these matters of meaning were circumscribed by the ring he wore on his finger, and the promise that he would be home. And so, as though by some supernatural force, he set his envelopes in order again, tucking them tightly beneath his jacket, trudging across the bridge, finally, to the other side.

He got off the bridge, into the rain, and he knew that the world was as it should be— it was how he had found it coming up the bridge, and how he knew he would find it coming down. Life sucks, he told himself. But all is well.

Untitled

2006-07-15T22:01:00.000+08:00

i . . .
. . . did not know
myself
who i was
where i was
what life was about
did i really matter?
i was incomplete,
alone
among friends, dissipation
among books, ennui
amidst living, mere existence
within: a void, without a love

i reached out and found you.

you ...
... stepped into my life
with a quiet violence
life fragile raindrops pounding upon parched grass.
you colored my being
with the depth of your eyes,
the warmth of your lips,
the sweetness of your person
you will always be one with me;
within me
you have become me

and i will never be the same.

we ...

Literature at the Ateneo

2006-07-14T00:51:00.000+08:00

If one wishes to understand the history and character of the Ateneo de Manila from its beginnings in 1859 as the Ateneo Municipal to the present Ateneo at Loyola Heights, one will inadvertently stumble upon the broad white sheets of Horacio dela Costa’s epic account of the Jesuits in the Philippines, aptly entitled, Light Cavalry. In this book, dela Costa writes about the Ateneo as it was, many, many years ago, when it was first behind the moss-covered walls of Intramuros, along Calle Anda, and then later on, at the Quonset huts of Padre Faura, before the outbreak of the Second World War. This was the Ateneo of José Rizal and Antonio Luna, the same Ateneo that would later give us a Raul Manglapus and a Leon Ma. Guerrero, a Roque Ferriols and a Catalino Arévalo. This was the Ateneo of myth and legend.

From these stories of days gone by, one gets a taste of what it is to be an Atenean— to be imbued with that special fire of sapientia et eloquentia that has been handed down from generation to generation. It is an Ateneo that, as dela Costa himself writes, “stands aloof from the hurry of the world, its precipitate flux, its mutability. It does not worry too much about being fashionable, because it knows that it has something to impart which is far better than what is merely new— something, in fact, which will always be newer than what is merely new—something, in short, that cannot die.” Dela Costa, of course, was pertaining to the Faith, for sure. But he was also pertaining to the Classics. And then, also, to Philosophy. Thus, dela Costa’s Ateneo gave its students a steady diet of Theology, Philosophy, and the Classics. Through such holistic, liberal education, the Ateneo then hoped to produce persons of conscience and competence, contemplation and action; in a word, whole persons.

It therefore becomes apparent that Literature (the Classics, most especially)— and, by extension, the Humanities— have also played a traditional role in the formation of the Atenean. Dela Costa himself describes bouts with Caesar’s Gaellic War that needed to be translated into English from the original Latin (Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres); the analysis and imitation of paragraphs by Chesterton (The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people); and the reading of poetry by Hopkins (As kingfishers catch fire dragonflies/ draw flame). It was hoped that through these exercises, the Atenean would gain an appreciation and understanding of humanity, of his joys and his fears, his terrors and his triumphs. In the end, this liberal education aimed at exposing the Atenean to what is beautiful and noble in human culture so that he would somehow be able to find a template, a pattern, against which he may fit his own life; no doubt, to attain Plato’s much-vaunted “examined life.”

Looking now at the present Ateneo, however, it would seem that Literature has taken a back seat to the more practical sciences of Accounting and Management, to name only a few. Gone is the rigor by which Literature had been pursued, and in its place, emerged a pale palliative of didactic frustration on the part of teachers, and passive, confused assent on the part of students. Indeed, in a University that once prided itself with the speaking of “Arrrneow” English, students no longer know Shakespeare, Dickens, Housman, or Eliot. And they are not the least bit bothered by it. In light of these facts, one cannot but lament the death of Literature, or at least, the literary tradition that dela Costa had known, the same one that formed Rizals, Manglapuses, Ferriolses and Arévalos.

We have, as Ateneans, lost a sense of the literary, simply because we live in a non-reading culture. With the rise of even more television, the Internet, and globalization, society itself has shifted its paradigms, exchanging the priority of humanitas to the more temporal search for the quaestus, prompting the American educator Theodore Hesburgh to question the future of liberal education, “especially in our day when the most popular course on [the] college campus [is] not literature or history, but accouting.”

I believe that the future of liberal education lies first and foremost in the recognition that it is, before anything else, an ideology (to borrow from Eagleton’s The Rise of English); it is an integrative center upon which to build the core of the truly human person. Literature, alongside Theology, Philosophy, History, and the Modern Languages, serves as a means to promote that one single classical end of humanitas— of forming the Atenean into a fully human person, in the same mold, perhaps, as the Ateneo of Intramuros or Padre Faura.

Because of the changes in paradigm and outlook, however, this end of humanitas is now much more nuanced; it is, in fact, made more imperative due to the popularity of the practical, albeit clinical (and perhaps, passionless) disciplines. Aside from being one of the normative standards of humanity as it had been in the past, Literature therefore serves the added purpose of being a critical counter-culture to the rise of Management and the Sciences, with their ideologies of profit and objectivity. Not that these endeavors are harmful in themselves; but by tempering the tendencies to objectify and categorize the world, Literature reminds students that “feeling is first”, allowing students alternative and complementary endeavors which invite them to approach life with the objectivity and linearity of Mathematics, yes, but also with the wonder and discovery of Literature and Philosophy. The purpose, then, is to give him the facility to answer the what's and the how’s, but also to have the courage and awareness to ask the why’s and the what-for’s; seeking, in the end, hopefully, “the last and greatest of all human dreams.”

In addition, Literature now serves the added purpose of complementing and bridging the sometimes-disparate world of Philosophy and Theology, no the one hand, and Management and the Sciences, on the other. It is the middle ground upon which these seemingly opposing disciplines meet. It is therefore not surprising to use Dickens’ “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” in The Tale of Two Cities as a preface to an understanding of Classical Economics; or Alyosha’s lament following the death of his teacher Zosima in Doestoyevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov to find its way into a discussion of the Philosophy of Religion; or even to use Dilsey and Benjy in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury as a template of God’s liberating love. Indeed, Literature at the Ateneo serves the purpose of bridging the theoretical gaps left by Theology, Philosophy, Management and the Sciences, making them more felt and fruitful by putting a more human face to Faith and Reason.

Finally, Literature at the Ateneo not only bridges the gap left by Philosophy, Theology and the Sciences, but also crosses the chasm created by social classes and cultures. Literature, in a very real sense, is a means by which the Atenean today is able to widen his or her horizons, allowing a better understanding of the world beyond his limited situation. It is knowing life vicariously through the transportive power of the written world, introducing him to the barricades of Hugo’s France, to the safaris of Hemingway’s Kilimanjaro, to the magic of Marquez’s South America, to the hidden caverns of cumming’s human heart. The world is open to the Atenean, perhaps not in the structured, academic manner of the old “learn’d by rote” Literature, but in a wide, genre-spanning totality of its curriculum.

The tragedy, though, is that all these opportunities are still largely left unrealized.

No doubt, Literature’s role at the Ateneo has not changed. Its role continues to be the formation of the truly human person, in the mold of sapientia et eloquentia. But many things have changed besides, and as the Ateneo had to squarely face the dawn of the next millennium, Literature, in a desire to remain effective and relevant, also found the need to change along with the times, necessitating— together with the primary aim of humanitas— the added role of critic, complement, and bridge. It had to relax old practices and revise tested beliefs— exchanging rigor for practical co-existence.

Reflecting on these roles, then, Literature at the Ateneo appears to be falling short of these aspirations. Literature to many, remains but another necessary page in the canon of requirements for the semester. Many, in fact, do not have an appreciation for the power of the written word. Gone, therefore, is the coveted contact with the immense treasure trove of significant human experience handed down fro the Greeks, the Latins, at the great writers and poets.

Certainly, nostalgia for the old Ateneo is easy in the face of this disillusionment. And in a way, this nostalgia is understandable. For indeed, with the falling of the Latin and Classical paradigm, “then I, and you, and all of us fell down”: surely, we had decidedly all lost something. Yet perhaps, in this new age, this “new” Ateneo of globalization, with its Sciences and Management may find its own new breed of Rizals, Manglapuses, Farrioles and Arévalos, who, while certainly less conversant in Cicero and Shakespeare, will be no less imbued with humanitas, sapientia et eloquentia. Indeed, only time will tell.

Universes

2006-07-08T08:02:00.000+08:00

BOSTON— Dr. Max Tegmark, a cosmologist from the Massachusetts Institude of technology, has come up with a groundbreaking paper, published in the Scientific American, which posits the existence of Parallel Universes. He predicts that, based on relativity and quantum mechanics, a parallel galaxy, similar to the Milky Way, exists about 10 to the 10 to the 28 meters from here. The estimate is derived from elementary probability and does not even assume speculative modern physics, merely that space is infinite (or at least sufficiently large) in size and almost uniformly filled with matter, as observations indicate. [Reuters]

Of course he would not say it. How could he? He was the best friend. In a situation that came straight out of a movie, he knew how these things ended: in a tight hug, a kiss on the forehead, and a gentle, albeit final, rejection. Many times, he had wanted to throw caution to the wind, damn all consequences, and just put in out in the open, as though it were some dark secret that needed to be exposed. But he couldn't. He just couldn't bring himself to do it. Indeed, perhaps the most difficult things to say are the most honest, and honesty, especially in matters such as these, was often a very delicate affair.

From the years that he had known her, since they had met in college, the relationship was always jovial and light. And he had wanted it that way. Or perhaps more precisely, he had no other choice— because by the time he had realized that he had wanted so much more from their relationship, she had settled on giving him exactly what they had: a friendship.

He himself didn't understand how it happened. It's just that he woke up one day and found himself loving her, that way. It was a quiet, growing knowledge of a special attraction, yes, but more importantly, an overriding desire to do things that made her happy. His friends called it over-extending, by which they meant to mean, going out of his way to do small things which made her smile; unnecessary things, but he enjoyed it, nonetheless. And before he knew it, he was no longer over-extending. It had become a habit, an impulse, a reflex, so that to him, the knowledge that “I love her,” became a mere statement of fact, a description of what simply was, no different than “the sky is blue,” or that “fire burns.”

But he could not tell her this, because he knew that he was exactly what he was, and she was exactly what she was. They were universes apart, a cosmic joke that didn't quite make sense. He was a successful professional, she was a print-ad model. He was stiff and uptight, she was glamorous and out-going. Many times, they have tried to explain how two seemingly opposite persons could become such good friends. And every time, through much laughter and reminiscences, they always arrived at the same answer: that they had met each other when they were still themselves, before the trappings of career, success and fame came to complicate many things.

It wasn't so bad, he thought. At least he knew that he had a special connection that many of her suitors only dream of approximating. More than once, in fact, he had been asked why it was that they were not together. Some even said that he was probably gay.

No, he was not gay. He was just the best friend.

And so one evening, over dinner, like so many other dinners they had gone to together, she said, “I can't understand how people who hardly know me at all can say that they care for me, that they love me, even. It's absurd!”

“Are your even surprised?” he asked, giving her an incredulous look. “I mean, it seems that every other night, you're out at Fiama, or somewhere.”

She gave out a hearty laugh! “Fiama? Good grief, that's so five minutes ago!”

“Whatever. You know what I mean.”

“God," she mumbled to herself as she took a sip of water, getting back to what she was saying. “I swear, men are so shallow!” Before she was finished with her sentence, however, her thoughts overtook her, and she launched into another story: “Like this guy, he'd come over to the agency, he'd bring food and stuff. He's a nice guy, really. But he's really weird.”

“Weird?”

“Yeah, he sends me e-mails saying that he feels that we have a special connection, and they he really cares a lot for me. . . . yada, yada, yada." She started rolling her eyes.

“Well, that's 'cause you're such a flirt,” he said to her flatly.

“I am not,” she protested, pointing a fork at him.

“Well, he wouldn't say these things if you didn't give him reason to,” he said, half-teasing. He was beyond being jealous. He'd heard the story before. He knew how the game with her went.

“That isn't the point,” she said. “The point is that they really don't have any basis! At all!" She gave him a thoughtful pause. “What is it that you used to tell me?”

“Which one?” he asked.

“That time, I even remember when you said it,” she shook her heard, trying hard to remember. “That we only know that which we love, and that we only love that which we know? Or something like that.”

“Yes, and your point being?”

“That these guys. . . . They don't even know me! How can they say all these things to me! I end up thinking that the reason why they want to be friends with me is because they have some sort of agenda! Just riles me, I guess.”

“Well, maybe next time, don't give them reason to think that you're open to their agendas,” he said, trying to be his dry, acerbic self. “But yes, you said it correctly: You can only know that which you love.”

“And you can only love that which you know, yes?"

“You learn well, my padowan,” he replied, smiling. But in his head, what he really wanted to say was, “So many people tell you that they love you. And yet that one person who really knows you best, the one person who really loves you, can't even come out and say it. . . .”

He drove her home that evening, as he would, after these monthly dinners. She sat quietly beside her in the car, the cabin cool from the air conditioning, the radio playing his favorite CD:

Maybe that's all that we need is to meet in the middle of impossibility
Standing at opposite poles, equal partners in a mystery.
We're standing at opposite poles, equal partners in a mystery.

“Hey,” he said, as they stopped at a stop-light. “I'm glad we're friends.” He looked at her and smiled.

“Yeah,” she said. “Me too.” She smiled back. And they returned to their comfortable silence.

He gave out a quiet sigh, at last, and thought: “A cosmic joke, indeed. But in my alternate universe, it would be different, because it would be you and I. And I wouldn't be afraid, because I would have nothing to lose. Indeed, in my alternate universe, the laws of physics break down: opposing poles meet, you would love me, that way. And we'd live happily ever after.”

An Epithalamium

2006-07-03T22:49:00.000+08:00

[In ancient Greece, a song by a number of boys and girls at the door of the nuptial chamber was traditionally sung in praise of the bride and the bridegroom. This song was called the Epithalamium]

Robert Fulghum, in his book It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It, tells of a tradition celebrated in the small French town of Puyricard, near Aix-en-Provence, where once a year, on the Feast of Saint John, townsfolk would light a bonfire around which they would dance throughout the night. During the intermission, however, between the music of the guitar, shepherd's flute and concertina, the people would not leave, but instead would stand gazing into the fire.

Suddenly, Fulghum writes, a young man and woman, holding each other tightly by the hand, ran and leaped high in the air throug the fierce flames, landing safely just beyond the edge of the coals. As the crowd applauded, the two embraced and walked away, wearing expressions of fearful joy, having tempted the fates and emerged unscathed to dance once more.

It was the leaping through the fire, Fulghum writes, that was at the heart of the Feast of Saint John.

“It worked this way,” he explains. “If you were lovers, married or not, or if you were just friends, even, and you wanted to seal your covenant, you made a wish together that you would never part, and then you rushed the fire and jumped over while holding hands. It was said that the hotter the fire and the higher the flames, the longer and closer would be the companionship. But it was also said that if you misjudged the fire and got singed or came down in the coals on the other side or lost your grip on one another while jumping, then evil would come to you and your bond.”

* * *

I watched an old friend take this leap last 2 July 2006, when he married his girlfriend of four years', at the Fernwood Gardens in Tandang Sora. For those of us who've known the groom for quite some time, even the idea of his having a girlfriend was quite a novelty. You see, David has always been the uncomplicated and wholesome one among us, the quiet, level-headed, serene character who always seemed to have a smile on his face and a dream in his heart. He was a quiet idealist, passionate yet unobstrusive. He remided us of the Little Prince.

So that when we learned that he had found a girlfriend, many of us knew that he was playing for keeps. It was probably the only way David knew how to love. And so from us who watched him from the sidelines (that is to say, heard about him and his girlfriend during Christmas parties or birthday celebrations), we realized that how he was as a person was exactly how he was as a boyfriend: uncomplicated, wholesome, considerate, passionate. It was a joy hearing about them.

What we did not quite understand about the couple, however, was during the time that they had been together, they had become really, really good friends.

It appears to me (and not that I am an authority in this: far from it, I think my track record speaks for itself) that the key to any good marriage is that the boy and the girl must first be good friends. It is the bedrock upon which any solid marital relationship is to be founded. This requirement may seem self-evident and obvious to many of us, and yet it is an ideal that very few people get to achieve.

Indeed, as Kent Nerburn observed, “The truly lucky people are the ones who manage to become long-time friends before they realize they are attracted to each other. They get to know each others laughs, passions, sadness, and fears. They see each other at their worst and at their best. They share time together before they get swept up into the entangling intimacy of their sexuality.”

I think the reason why Dave and Anna project such a wonderful aura together is because they have genuinely found in each other a best friend, a partner, a soulmate, even, for those romantics among us who still believe. More than the physical attraction and the comfortable presence brought about by proximity and time, I can sense a genuine sharing and intersection of life-goals and missions. Not just mere toleration or acceptance, but a shared common purpose: love is not looking at each other; it's looking at the same direction.

(David and Anna, of course, are flying to Canada by the middle of this month to pursue graduate studies together at Rotman College at the University of Toronto. They intend to live there for five years, as both of them try to learn “how to change the world.”)

But together with this friendship, I think that what I like best about the couple is the innocence by which they have carried their relationship. It is, I think, vintage David: a person who is (and hopefully will be) uncomplicated, unsullied by the disillusionments of the world. He really had nothing to prove, and thus had nothing to prove to Anna. He really had no baggage to carry, and thus had no baggage to deposit at her feet. He really was genuinely satisfied with his life, and thus had no issues to give to Anna to solve. I tried to explain this once, how David could go on with life so placidly and comfortably, and I came to one conclusion: David knows that he is securely loved.

One need only look at his mother, teary-eyed as he was reciting his vows, and you'd know that this is absolutely true.

* * *

And the leaping continued on through the night, where the young of heart and the fleet of foot took their chance before the fire. As the evening grew darker and the fire burned lower, the more cautious made their move. Some did not clear the fire; some jumped too soon and some too late and some ran to the fire only to stop short, and some broke their grip, with one partner jumping while the other held back at the last moment.

At evening's end, however, when only glowing coals remained, there was played a traditional tune signaling a last dance. As the final note of the shepherd's flute faded, the villager encircled the soft glow of the embers and fell silent. the village couple married longest caught hands, and gracefully, solemnly, stepped together over what was once fire. At that signal of benediction, the villagers embraced and walked off into the starry, starry night toward home, and all the fires of love ever after. . . .

I end with a poem by John Gardiner Calkins Brainard, which I think best captures my wishes for Dave and Anna:

I SAW two clouds at morning,
Tinged with the rising sun,
And in the dawn they floated on,
And mingled into one:
I thought that morning cloud was blest,
It moved so sweetly to the west.

I saw two summer currents
Flow smoothly to their meeting,
And join their course, with silent force,
In peace each other greeting:
Calm was their course through banks of green,
While dimpling eddies played between.

Such be your gentle motion,
Till life’s last pulse shall beat;
Like summer’s beam, and summer’s stream,
Float on, in joy, to meet
A calmer sea, where storms shall cease—
A purer sky, where all is peace.

May they walk off from the many challenges of their shared life intact into the starry, starry night, toward home, and all the fires of love ever after. . . .

Partners and Marriages

2006-07-02T22:00:00.000+08:00

I have never met a man who didn't want to be loved. But I have seldom met a man who didn't fear marriage. Something about the closure seems constricting, not enabling. Marriage seems easier to understand for what it cuts out of our lives than for what it makes possible within our lives.

When I was younger this fear immobilized me. I did not want to make a mistake. I saw my friends get married for reasons of social acceptability, or sexual fever, or just because they thought it was the logical thing to do. Then I watched as they and their partners became embittered and petty in their dealings with each other. I looked at older couples and saw, at best, mutual toleration of each other. I imagined a lifetime of loveless nights and bickering days and could not imagine subjecting myself or someone else to such a fate.

And yet, on rare occasions, I would see old couples who somehow seemed to glow in each others presence. They seemed really in love, not just dependent upon each other and tolerant of each others foibles. It was an astounding sight, and it seemed impossible. How, I asked myself, can they have survived so many years of sameness, so much irritation at the others habits? What keeps love alive in them, when most of us seem unable to even stay together, much less love each other?

The central secret seems to be in choosing well. There is something to the claim of fundamental compatibility. Good people can create a bad relationship, even though they both dearly want the relationship to succeed. It is important to find someone with whom you can create a good relationship from the outset. Unfortunately, it is hard to see clearly in the early stages. Sexual hunger draws you to each other and colors the way you see yourselves together. It blinds you to the thousands of little things by which relationships eventually survive or fail. You need to find a way to see beyond this initial overwhelming sexual fascination.

Some people choose to involve themselves sexually and ride out the most heated period of sexual attraction in order to see what is on the other side. This can work, but it can also leave a trail of wounded hearts. Others deny the sexual side altogether in an attempt to get to know each other apart from their sexuality. But they cannot see clearly, because the presence of unfulfilled sexual desire looms so large that it keeps them from having any normal perception of what life would be like together.

The truly lucky people are the ones who manage to become long-time friends before they realize they are attracted to each other. They get to know each others laughs, passions, sadness, and fears. They see each other at their worst and at their best. They share time together before they get swept up into the entangling intimacy of their sexuality. This is the ideal, but not often possible.

If you fall under the spell of your sexual attraction immediately, you need to look beyond it for other keys to compatibility. One of these is laughter. Laughter tells you how much you will enjoy each others company over the long term. If your laughter together is good and healthy, and not at the expense of others, then you have a healthy relationship to the world. Laughter is the child of surprise. If you can make each other laugh, you can always surprise each other. And if you can always surprise each other, you can always keep the world around you new.

Beware of a relationship in which there is no laughter. Even the most intimate relationships based only on seriousness have a tendency to turn sour. Over time, sharing a common serious viewpoint on the world tends to turn you against those who do not share the same viewpoint, and your relationship can become based on being critical together. After laughter, look for a partner who deals with the world in a way you respect.

When two people first get together, they tend to see their relationship as existing only in the space between the two of them. They find each other endlessly fascinating, and the overwhelming power of the emotions they are sharing obscures the outside world. As the relationship ages and grows, the outside world becomes important again. If your partner treats people or circumstances in a way you can't accept, you will inevitably come to grief. Look at the way he/she cares for others and deals with the daily affairs of life. If that makes you love him/her more, your love will grow. If it does not, be careful. If you do not respect the way you each deal with the world around you, eventually the two of you will not respect each other.

Look also at how your partner confronts the mysteries of life. We live on the cusps of poetry and practicality, and the real life of the heart resides in the poetic. If one of you is deeply affected by the mystery of the unseen in life and relationships, while the other is drawn only to the literal and the practical, you must take care that the distance does not become an unbridgeable gap that leaves you each feeling isolated and misunderstood.

There are many other keys, but you must find them by yourself. We all have unchangeable parts of our hearts that we will not betray and private commitments to a vision of life that we will not deny. If you fall in love with someone who cannot nourish those inviolable parts of you, or if you cannot nourish them in her, you will find yourselves growing further apart until you live in separate worlds where you share the business of life, but never touch each other where the heart lives and dreams. From there it is only a small leap to the cataloging of petty hurts and daily failures that leaves so many couples bitter and unsatisfied with their mates. So choose carefully and well. If you do, you will have chosen a partner with whom you can grow, and then the real miracle of marriage can take place in your hearts.

I pick my words carefully when I speak of a miracle. But I think it is not too strong a word. There is a miracle in marriage. It is called transformation. Transformation is one of the most common events of nature. The seed becomes the flower. The cocoon becomes the butterfly. Winter becomes spring and love becomes a child. We never question these, because we see them around us every day. To us they are not miracles, though if we did not know them they would be impossible to believe. Marriage is a transformation we choose to make. Our love is planted like a seed, and in time it begins to flower. We cannot know the flower that will blossom, but we can be sure that a bloom will come. If you have chosen carefully and wisely, the bloom will be good. If you have chosen poorly or for the wrong reason, the bloom will be flawed.

We are quite willing to accept the reality of negative transformation in a marriage. It was negative transformation that always had me terrified of the bitter marriages that I feared when I was younger. It never occurred to me to question the dark miracle that transformed love into harshness and bitterness. Yet I was unable to accept the possibility that the first heat of love could be transformed into something positive that was actually deeper and more meaningful than the heat of fresh passion. All I could believe in was the power of this passion and the fear that when it cooled I would be left with something lesser and bitter. But there is positive transformation as well. Like negative transformation, it results from a slow accretion of little things. But instead of death by a thousand blows, it is growth by a thousand touches of love.

Two histories intermingle. Two separate beings, two separate presences, two separate consciousness come together and share a view of life that passes before them. They remain separate, but they also become one. There is an expansion of awareness, not a closure and a constriction, as I had once feared. This is not to say that there is not tension and there are not traps. Tension and traps are part of every choice of life, from celibate to monogamous to having multiple lovers. Each choice contains within it the lingering doubt that the road not taken is somehow more fruitful and exciting, and each becomes pulled to the richness that it alone contains. But only marriage allows life to deepen and expand and be leavened by the knowledge that two have chosen, against all odds, to become one. Those who live together without marriage can know the pleasure of shared company, but there is a specific gravity in the marriage commitment that deepens that experience into something richer and more complex.

So do not fear marriage, just as you should not rush into it for the wrong reasons. It is an act of faith and it contains within it the power of transformation. If you believe in your heart that you have found someone with whom you are able to grow, if you have sufficient faith that you can resist the endless attraction of the road not taken and the partner not chosen, if you have the strength of heart to embrace the cycles and seasons that your love will experience, then you may be ready to seek the miracle that marriage offers.

If not, then wait. The easy grace of a marriage well made is worth your patience. When the time comes, a thousand flowers will bloom.

from “Letters to My Son” by Kent Nerburn.

Ano? Sino? ang Diyos?

2006-06-19T20:03:00.000+08:00

Pinagsisikapan natin, sa ating katutubong pagmumuni-muni at isip, na humantong sa isang matinong pagkilala sa pag-iral at katotohanan ng Diyos. Marami ngang landas na maaring tahakin, ngunit pumuli tayo ng tatlo, at sa pamamagitan ng tatlong landas na ito— madalas man magkamali at madapa-- maaari nating makilala, sa pamamagitan ng ating isip at diwa, ang Diyos, “mula sa malayo.”

1. Diyos sa Proportio at Participatio. Sa pagtanaw at pagdanas sa pagmemeron ng lahat ng sanlinikha, nakikilala natin ang Diyos bilang siyang Mismong Meron na nagpapa-iral sa lahat lahat ng nagmemeron sa pamamagitan ng proportio at participatio. Tumutungo ang buong sangkameronan sa Kanyang kanila pinagmulan, at sabay sinasalamin Siya sa mahiwagang “paggaganito ng bawat nagmemeron.” Sabi nga ni Hopkins,

I say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst— for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

2. Diyos na Siyang Nagpapameron. Nakikilala rin natin ang Diyos bilang may poder sa meron na siyang nagpapameron sa mga marupok na linalang na “maaaring hindi magmeron.” Ang Diyos na siyang lumalaban sa mismong kawalan upang pameronin ang bawat linalang sa bawat oras at sa bawat sandali. Sa ganitong paraan, masasabing nakabitin ang lahat sa kanya— sapagka't wala sa mga linikhang linalang ang kakayahan at poder sa meron. At ang kilos na ito ay kilos ng pag-ibig.

3. Diyos sa Kaayusan ng Lahat-lahat. Sa wakas, nakikita din natin, sa ating pagtanaw sa daigdig, ang isang malalim kaayusan na siyang tumuturo sa pag-iral ng isang makapangyarihang Diyos. Ang kaayusan na ito'y lampas sa anumang sistema ng agham o konsepto ng isipan, at sa isang tahimik na paraan-- kung makikinig lamang tayo-- nararamdaman natin ang lagda ng Diyos sa likod ng kaayusang ito. Kung kaya't kahit sa gitna ng nagmimistulang kaguluhan, may nananaig pa rin na mahiwagang kaayusan.

Ngunit sa tatlong landas na ito, tila meron pa ring kulang. Sapagka't hindi nga siguro sapat ang pag-iisip sa kung ano ang Diyos, at tila baga kay layo pa rin sa Kanyang tunay na katotohanan bilang Diyos ang pagbibigay sa Kanya ng mga pangalang “mismong meron,” “poder ng lahat-lahat” at “pinagmumulan ng kaayusan.” Tila baga hindi sapat tanungin kung ANO lamang ang Diyos, sapagka't kasabay ng pag-uunawa natin sa kung ano nga Siya, nakikilala natin na, kasabay ng mga katotohanang ito, ang Diyos ay personal, nakikipag-kapuwa sa atin, at para sa ating mga Kristiyano (at maging sa ibang mga relihiyon), minamahal tayo. Hindi nga wasto na alamin lamang ang kung “ano ang Diyos” na para bagang ito'y isang “Ano ang isang bato”. . . . sapagka't ang Diyos ay hindi lamang isang ANO, kung 'di isang SINO.

Tunay ngang personal ang tao— may ANO at SINO. Ano ang tao? Ganito. Sino ang tao? Siya. Ngayon, kung hindi personal ang Diyos, tila bagang humihigit ang tao sa Kanya. Ngunit nakita natin na ang tao ay puspos ng kahinaan. Kaya't halos napipilitan tayong aminin na personal ang Diyos. At totoo nga! Dahil mismong nararanasan natin ito— sa kanyang pagkilala sa Kanyang sarili, umuusbong ang lahat, maging ang pinakamunting butil ng buhangin!

Kaya nga naman ang Diyos ay matatawag nating Ama, kapatid, kaibigan, irog. Sapagka't ang Diyos ay nakikipag-ugnay sa atin sa isang malalim na paraan. Ngunit kasabay ng pagmamalapit na ito, umiiral din ang katotohanan na ang Diyos ay mismong Meron, Poder at Kaayusan. Siya na tinatawag kong ama o kaibigan ang siya ring lumikha ng sanlinikha!

Marahil, sa puntong ito, mabuting gamitin ang mga paniniwala si Santo Tomas de Aquino sa pangungsap at pagkilala sa Diyos. Sinasabi niyang sa tuwing sinasabi natin na Isa, Totoo at Mabuti ang Diyos, meron nga talaga tayong sinasabi ngunit sa paraang formaliter, eminenter at per negationem. Formaliter, sapagka't dahil sa ating pagbigkas sa kung ano o sino ang Diyos, mayroon tayong kakayahan na kilalanin Siya; na may sinasabi nga talaga tayong totoo. Ngunit kasabay nito, eminenter ang ating pagbigas, sapagka't ang katotohanang binibigkas natin tungkol sa Diyos ay lampas na lampas pa rin sa ating pag-uunawa. Kung kaya't sa pagkilala natin sa limitadong paraan ng ating pag-uunawa, sa gitna nitong apaw at lampas na katotohanan sa eminenter, hindi pa rin natin alam, at tila wala pa rin tayong nasabi. Kung kaya't naiiwan na lamang tayo sa pagbibigkas sa kung ano hindi ang Diyos, sa pamamagitan ng per negationem.

Sa katapusan ng lahat, namumulatan tayo na tunay ngang may kakayahan tayong dumating sa isang matinong pag-uunawa sa Diyos, ngunit alam nating kulang na kulang ito. Humahanap tayo ng mga salita at talinhaga upang maunawaan ang Kanyang katotohanan, at minsan ito'y nakakatulong. Kung dahil humaharap tayo sa isang hiwaga, hindi natin Siya lubos na natatarok. Ngunit malalapitan pa rin. Kaya't ang nararapat na tugon ay pagkukumbaba, pagkilala na “kapag nasabi na ang lahat ng masasabi, ang pinakamahalaga ay hindi masasabi.” Kaya nga siguro, si Santo Tomas, ang siyang sumulat ng malalalim na pagmumuni-muni tungkol sa katotohanan ng Diyos, ay bigla na lamang tumigil sa kanyang pagsusulat, at hindi na sumulat muli, nang, isang umaga, habang itinataas ang ostia habang nagmimisa, naunawaan niya na ang lahat ng kanyang naisulat at nakita ay anino lamang ng tunay na katotohanan ng Diyos. “Everything that I have written is straw,” ika niya.

Ngunit sa gitna ng pagkalitong ito, naghahanap pa rin tayo, at hinahanap rin Niya tayo. Marahil totoo nga ang sinasabi nila tungkol sa pag-uunawa sa Diyos— na para bagang pilit nating isinusuksok ang buong karagatan sa isang maliit na butas. Ngunit buong-giting at ligawa pa rin tayong nag-iigib, sabay nagpapabasa sa kahiwagahan ng Kanyang tubig-buhay.

The Sacrament of Waiting

2006-06-14T19:03:00.000+08:00

The English poet John Milton once wrote that those also serve who only stand and wait. I think I would go further and say that those who wait render the highest form of service. Waiting requires more discipline, more self-control and emotional maturity, more unshakeable faith in our cause, more unwavering hope in the future, more sustaining love in our hearts than all the great deeds of derring-do that go by the name of action.

Waiting is a mystery— a natural sacrament of life. There is a meaning hidden in all the times we have to wait. It must be an important mystery because there is so much waiting in our lives.

Everyday is filled with those little moments of waiting— testing our patience and our nerves, schooling us in our self-control— pasensya na lang. We wait for meals to be served, for a letter to arrive, for a friend, concerts and circuses. Our airline terminals, railway stations, and bus depots are temples of waiting filled with men and women who wait in joy for the arrival of a loved one— or wait in sadness to say goodbye and to give that last wave of hand. We wait for birthdays and vacations; we wait for Christmas. We wait for spring to come or autumn— for the rains to begin or stop.

And we wait for ourselves to grow from childhood to maturity. We wait for those inner voices that tell us when we are ready for the next step. We wait for graduation, for our first job, our first promotion. We wait for success, and recognition. We wait to grow up— to reach the stage where we make our own decision.

We cannot remove this waiting from our lives. It is part of the tapestry of living—the fabric in which the threads are woven that tell the story of our lives.

Yet the current philosophies would have us forget the need to wait. “Grab all the gusto you can get.” So reads one of America’s great beer advertisements— Get it now. Instant pleasure— instant transcendence. Don’t wait for anything. Life is short— eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you’ll die. And so they rationalize us into accepting unlicensed and irresponsible freedom— premarital sex and extramarital affairs— they warn against attachment and commitment, against expecting anything of anybody, or allowing them to expect anything of us, against vows and promises, against duty and responsibility, against dropping any anchors in the currents of our life that will cause us to hold and to wait.

This may be the correct prescription for pleasure— but even that is fleeting and doubtful. What was it Shakespeare said about the mad pursuit of pleasure? “Past reason hunted, and once had, past reason hated.” Now if we wish to be real human beings, spirit as well as flesh, souls as well as heart, we have to learn to love someone else other than ourselves.

For most of all waiting means waiting for someone else. It is a mystery brushing by our face everyday like stray wind or a leaf falling from a tree. Anyone who has ever loved knows how much waiting goes into it, how much waiting is important for love to grow, to flourish through a lifetime.

Why is this so? Why can’t we have love right now— two years, three years, five years— and seemingly waste so much time? You might as well ask why a tree should take so long to bear fruit, the seed to flower, carbon to change into a diamond.

There is no simple answer, no more than there is to life’s demands: having to say goodbye to someone you love because either you or they have already made other commitments, or because they have to grow and find the meaning of their own lives, having yourself to leave home and loved ones to find your path. Goodbyes, like waiting, are also sacraments of our lives.

All we know is that growth— the budding, the flowering of love needs patient waiting. We have to give each other time to grow. There is no way we can make someone else truly love us or we love them, except through time. So we give each other that mysterious gift of waiting— of being present without making demands or asking rewards. There is nothing harder to do than this. It tests the depth and sincerity of our love. But there is life in the gift we give.

So lovers wait for each other until they can see things the same way, or let each other freely see things in quite different ways. What do we lose when lovers hurt each other and cannot regain the balance and intimacy of the way they were? They have to wait— in silence— but still be present to each other until the pain subsides to an ache and then only a memory, and the threads of the tapestry can be woven together again in a single love story.

What do we lose when we refuse to wait? When we try to find short cuts through life, when we try to incubate love and rush blindly and foolishly into a commitment we are neither mature nor responsible enough to assume? We lose the hope of ever truly loving or being loved. Think of all the great love stories of history and literature. Isn’t it of their very essence that they are filled with the strange but common mystery— that waiting is part of the substance, the basic fabric— against which the story of that true love is written?

How can we ever find either life of love if we are too impatient to wait for it?

by Father James Donelan, S.J.

Pagluwas

2006-06-04T22:36:00.000+08:00

Island
PBR Summer Outing 2006,
Eagle Point, Batangas

IIsa ang lunti, sa matang nakadungaw
sa gilid ng barko,
sa bihis ng pakwang hinog,
at sa murang kawayang tinabas
sa takdang tigas ng buho.

Sa pagdidilim naman,
hindi mapagsino ang mga bituin
sa dami ng kislap, sa tulis at talim
ng alon, taas-baba, waring hinahasa—
sa liwanag ng nag-iisang buwan.

Habang tumutulak ang barkong punyal
sa mundong hinog na, sa paghahati
lumulusong lamang tayo,
inaakalang nailagda ang sugat
sa balat ng dagat.

Sa muling paglingon sa tinalunton,
madulas na umaagos sa ating talim
ang napag-iisa pa ring dagat
walang galos, pumayapa—
banayad sa pagtaas, pagbaba.

Noel Romero del Prado
mula sa Sa Balat ng Dagat

Fathers and Sons

2006-05-24T21:02:00.000+08:00

The following is an email which my dad sent to his high school classmates through their electonic mailing list. For many of us who are starting out with our careers, it's good to be reminded of the things that truly matter.

* * *

To : "class70"
Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2002 11:03:22 -0800 (PST)

Subject : Carpe Diem

Dear folks,

As I prepare to visit the remains of the father of a batchmate, I am drawn back to my own personal awakening a few years ago.

I was engrossed in career, in money matters, in winning the rat race and as you guys know, the higher you go up the corporate ladder and the more you have, the more the tension, the pressures, the minutiae that one has to attend to on a daily grinding basis. There are not enough hours in day.

And then all of a sudden my aunt died. Two weeks comatose in the intensive care unit and she was gone. She was an old maid and we considered her as our second mother who supported and helped out and cared for me and my siblings, all throughout our lives.

And as I stroked the hair of my comatose aunt, I had so many words of gratitude and love that I wanted to say. But her bloated body was struggling for its every breath and I could not reach her. I felt so frustrated, so weak, so powerless.

And the finality of death hit me with such force. Tapos. Kaput. An emptiness, a vacuum. I can never pull back time, even for just a minute, to express and show feelings that I had for a loved one.

I then looked at my two sons. PJ was about to graduate from college; driving his own car and leading his own life, we would have to twist his arm to attend family gatherings. I distinctly remember the days when he would happily sleep in our room. Now, we very rarely even get to talk to him. The little boy has turned into a man and I was at the office too busy to watch him grow before my eyes. I determined that I would get to enjoy my other son, Jem, a little bit more.

The pressures from the office, the growth of my sons, the death of my aunt all seemed to coalesce to goad me into a decision. Money or quality of life? How much is enough?

So I retired after 20 years with Ayala, 25 years of corporate life all in all. That opened my perspective on life.

Today, I am part of the “hatsun” brigade of the Ateneo— hatid-sundo of Jem [although next year, he’ll probably be driving himself]. In my retired state, I go to the office of my sister as consultant where I also do my e-mails in the comfort of an air-con room with a secretary. The best part is— it’s ten minutes from the house and I’m relatively free from the traffic which I singularly detest.

Kahit makulit at matigas ang ulo nila, I persevere everyday to see my parents who are now both 85. I even bring along my dad to the family office just to let him read the newspapers and doze off in the couch while I do e-mail and my daily chores. Looking at him humped over in the chair, I know that his life was given for his family, for us his children. Filled with gratitude, I try to do the many small things to show my appreciation, now— when they're still around.

In the end, if you really analyze it, these acts of gratitude are not for them, they’re for me! In my mind, sinubukan kong suklian kahit kaunti ang lahat ng pinagkaloob nila sa akin.

Guys, if you still have your folks, count yourselves blessed. Embrace them and tell them you love them. NOW. Carpe diem. Seize the day. It ain't ever coming back.

Best regards,

Jojo B

My Wonder Years

2006-05-20T19:44:00.000+08:00

'Pag sapit sa 'tin ng tag-ulan,
Taglay ma'y dusa't kabiguan,
Ang gunita ng ating tag-araw,
Sa kadilima'y siyang tatanglaw.

Nang batis lamang ang tumatangis,
At ang pag-ibig, anong tamis.
Alalahanin, gunitain,
Kahapon nati'y sariwain.

Sa Pagbubukas ng Pinto

2006-05-18T21:02:00.000+08:00

Dagok nga sa puso
ang pagbubukas ng pinto,
sapagka’t ako’y naiipit
sa pagitan ng kahoy at semento;
di mo nakikita, at di mo nalalaman
ngunit ako’y pisa at nasusugatan
para lamang ikaw ay makapasok
nakangiti’t nagmamadali
upang siya’y makitang
naghihintay sa kabila. . .

Di mo ba nalalaman—
paano mo malalaman—
na ako’y pisa sa likod ng pinto,
at siya pang nagbukas nito
para sa ‘yo?

Kay Y.

Let's Volt In!

2006-05-15T20:33:00.000+08:00

I sometimes forget how old I am. Being around my brother's friends, I am reminded that, unlike them, I was born on the last year of the age of hippies and Woodstock. I'd talk to them about The Perfect Strangers and Michael Jackson's songs when he was still African American. All I'd get were blank stares. I would often feel old.

It was therefore a pleasant surprise when, surfing through channels last night, I stumbled upon a re-airing of Voltes V [which they dubbed in Filipino]! Suddenly, I was seven again, calling out the names of my childhood heroes: Steve, Big Bert, Little John, Jamie Robsinon and Mark Gordon! I did not forget a single detail: Camp Big Falcon, the Japanese lyrics to the volt-in theme, Voltes's many hidden weapons. I even remembered the particular episode they were airing: when Mrs. Armstrong was killed when she piloted a jet into a beast fighter in order to save the Voltes Team from certain death!

The episode transported me back to those lazy late afternoons when, coming home from school, I would park myself in front of the television set, and, eating my merienda of chicken sopas, I would lose myself watching my cartoons on channel 13! Most days, it was Voltes V. On others, it was the RoadRunner! Sometimes, they would show re-runs of the Bugs Bunny series! I can even remember one particular episode when Bugs is unwittingly kidnapped by Marvin the Martian's flying saucer:

Bugs: Hello, ob-jay-dar, hello space probe, hello earth. . . . But if that's the earth, where the cotton-pickin-heck am I?
Marvin: Why, you are on Mars, isn't that lovely?
Bugs: Mars? You mean the planet Mars?

Indeed, it is only now that I fully realize that I am a child of the 1980's. We learned our English from Sesame Street, and our Filipino from Batibot. Our video games were the game-and-watch and the Atari. Ours was the time when computers had 5 1/2 inchs disks for memory devices, and [ctrl]-K-B had some significance as we typed our documents on WordStar. We were obsessed with Japanese robots: Voltes V, Voltron, Grendizer, Mazinger-Z, Mechanda Robot, Daimos. We pined for an Optimus Prime toy, and memorized the dialogue to the Transformers Motion Picture.

Later on, we graduated to G.I. Joe's and Robotech. We bought Nintendos and went crazy over Super Mario Brothers. We just had to have the latest Trapper Keeper designs, and we bought the latest casette tapes of Pearl Jam. The more baduy of us watched Bagets, and even, perhaps Mikee Cojuangco's Forever.

It was a magical decade.

Of course, most of us are working now, nearing age thirty faster than we'd be comfortable to admit. In a year, it will be a decade since many of us graduated from high school. Some of us have gotten married. Some of us have sired children. Some have become lawyers, or doctors, or film directors, or businessmen. And yet as varied as our careers have turned out to be, we are forever bound by the events and influences which shaped that magical decade. As John Updike wrote:

We took the world as given.
Cigarettes were twenty-several cents a pack,
And gas as much per gallon. Sex came wrapped in rubber
And veiled in supernatural scruples—
Call them chivalry . . . .

Psychology was in the mind; abstract
things grabbed us where we lived; the only life
worth living was the private life, and— last,
Worst scandal in this characterization—
We did not know we were a generation.

And so, children of the eighties, here we are. As we come to our own, as the torch is passed to us, I can only pray that we will leave our children with the same fond memories we experienced during our own coming of age. In the meantime, many of us will smile ruefully as we watch the next generation of children get hooked on the things that marked our own childhoods: Volltes V, among others. We may even watch the shows together with them, and for that brief thirty minutes, we will be seven years old all over again.

The Promise of the Rain

2006-05-11T20:16:00.000+08:00

“’Pag tila ka nasasakupan
ng lumbay at kalungkutan,
ambon lang ‘yan.”

How the rain makes us remember. . . . How the rain makes us look ahead. . . .

Yesterday, I stood outside on the half-drenched concrete, watching as the clouds formed a mild grey above me. It was the first rain of the season. The pungent sweet smell of dry asphalt filled the air around me— it was the fragrance of parched earth— and I knew that the summer had finally ended.

What fascination I have with the rain can perhaps be explained by the melancholy musings that, from time to time, I find myself yielding to, evoking memory, heightening regret. Indeed, there is a certain sadness that accompanies the rain: a certain constant, dull, nagging loneliness that seeps into soul and being, intensifying longing, leaving one cold and wet. It is a loneliness that we need from time to time, I guess, if only to remind us that we are still human.

Just this morning, as the rain fell hard on my way to work, I remembered those comfortable drives, cold and fuzzy on similar rainy days, as I went early to Rockwell, when I was still a student of law. I remembered the simplicity and the rhythm by which we lived our lives, a simplicity which we did not then realize, because we were too caught up in our small petty issues. (If only we knew!) There was a comfort in the regularity of those days, a security of seeing the same people, the confidence of doing the same things. And I remembered also the mild excitement of the possibility that classes would be called-off, and the plans that suddenly materialized in order to pass the time. But most of all, this morning's rain reminded me of the people I left behind there, who surely went ahead together with me, but became, inadvertently (myself as well), different people. Who were we in first year law school, second year, third year, fourth year, do you still remember?

Indeed, it is some comfort to know that even in the midst of these seemingly jarring changes (I thought), it is still the same rain that falls. In that great cycle of nature, the water which fell upon our backs as we crossed with our books to our classes and to our friends, will fall again, as we cross to different places and seek wider horizons. It is this promise of the rain that I remember as I cross the street to work today, under a different and perhaps greyer sky than what I had known before.

Indeed, that the rain will fall is certain: a signal that seasons change. Yet in that change, I put faith in the fact that nothing is lost, nothing is wasted. As the Spanish say, nada se pierde, todo se transforma. The rain is a reassuring reminder.

Ano Nga Ba Tayo?

2006-05-09T01:03:00.000+08:00

A charming poem I found scribbled in one of my college notebooks. It's not by me, though; I think a college blockmate [or her then beau] composed it. Strange, what one finds in old college stuff.

Ano nga ba tayo
kung 'di alaala na lamang
na ikekwento sa mga
magiging apo natin,
kung sumagi man sa isipan?

Ano nga ba tayo
kung 'di saglit ng magpakailanman,
binabalikan,
natapos,
bago pa man mag-umpisa?

Ano nga ba tayo
kung 'di ang magkabilang hati
ng iisang buo,
naghahanapan,
hindi magkatagpo?

Faltar el Punto

2006-05-07T11:59:00.000+08:00

Aquí estamos otra vez, intentando figurar de cuál hacer después. Era un salto que intentaba reunirse todavía, a pesár de todo que se sucede ya, y a pesár de todo que será a ocurrir. Era probablemente más el concepto equivocado en mi cabeza— que este vez, él será diferente; que este vez, él será mejor. Y entonces trago otra vez mis orgullos y dudas, intentando convencerle que sea realmente un individuo agradable, un persona de mérito, un hombre cambiante. No puedo negar que tomaste un salto también; que habíamos tomado el salto conjuntos.

Pero el problema con conceptos en mi cabeza es que estan demasiado ideales y demasiado perfectos. Y como con todos cosas que sea ideales y perfectos, al fin, uno acaba decepcionado y descenso.

Y por eso, aquí estamos otra vez, en al borde de otro silencio frío, descubriendo el que ha estado mirando fijamente nosotros en la cara desde que: que tenemos relacion que, de largo desde, ha prescrito.

No, no está debido a la gente alrededor de nosotros. Y ni uno ni otro es él una falta del deseo en nuestras partes. Simplemente (y absolutamente tristemente), es nosotros— cómo tratamos de uno a otro, cómo no somos cómodos con nuestros historias; cómo no estamos seguros de nuestros futuros.

Entonces, por favor, no me digas que yo no intenté bastante, porque lo hice mucho. Más que puedes imaginarse. No me digas que no pensé de ti, porque lo hago, cada vez que yo soy solo o asustado o el lastimar. No me digas que me odias, cada pulgada y el alma de mí, porque yo sé que estás diciendo esto solamente porque estás enojado, o porque no sabes qué hacer también.

No me digas todas estas cosas, porque me demuestra que has faltado el punto de los dos de nosotros. Porque cada vez que dices estas cosas, me recuerdas que no tenia nunca razon sobre ti, en la primera vez.

Duped!

2006-05-06T19:13:00.000+08:00

After one passes the Bar, everything else seems so anti-climactic. Talking to our Managing Partner before leaving for a Testimonial Dinner the firm was tendering for our honor, I told him that passing the Bar seemed like a distant memory. Due perhaps to the humdrum of the work-a-day world, reality is dulled into a routinary rhythm of assignments and tasks, so that any previous elation is reduced to a simple statement of fact: we passed. I guess it's the classic human response to finally getting what we've long worked for. The satisfaction, while admitted, is not exactly what we thought it would be.

And so, while family and friends have suggested that I celebrate the event with a party, I opted to let the moment pass with a Mass and dinner at one of my favorite Italian restaurants. This was enough.

And so, as the weeks marched on from that fateful day in March, I went about my work and looked forward to living the rest of my life, without nary a thought that something was happening in the background. Perhaps it was because I was too wrapped up in the everyday routine of work and worry, I did not notice things happening around me.

It started one afternoon when a friend, Euge, texted me that he urgently needed to speak to me and whether I was free on the evening of 5 May 2006. I told him that I had a firm badminton tournament in the evening, but that I would gladly meet with him. He was being sued for perjury, after having executed an affidavit in a case he was handling. The complainant was blackmailing him in exchange for dropping the charges.

In the meantime, I overheard my mom talking to someone over the phone one morning, insisting that the person she was talking to attend a party she was throwing that same Friday night. I figured it was her high school friends planning a party. It seemed normal enough.

And so, as 5 May 2006 approached, I got more and more curious about my friend's perjury case. Almost nine months after the Bar, one gets rusty with the details of the law, and so I had to brush up on my penal code provisions, trying to think of possible defenses to his predicament. I was also informed that he would be meeting with the complainant that evening, and appreciated my presence in order to sort things out.

Deciding to skip our badminton tournament, I rushed back to the house intending to make an appearance at my mom's party. However, my friend was insistent: the complainant was already there. And so I drove straight to Seattle's Best along E. Rodriguez to meet with my friend, who promptly narrated to me the facts of his case. For over an hour, we strategized on how to handle the situation, thinking of the possible consequences which a criminal charge would cause.

The complainant, however, was taking such a long time in arriving, and so my friend suggested that we go to my house first to wait for him to arrive. I agreed, thinking that there being my mom's party at home, there would be food to eat anyway.

And so I arrived at the house, seeing all the cars parked along the street. My mom's guests, I thought. I entered the house with my key, with my mom meeting me, shouting “Surprise! Surprise!” I didn't quite get it: why was she shouting, “Surprise!” when it was her party anyway. It was not until I saw my law school classmates in the dining room that I realized that I was had. Big time.

The only thing I could say was, “Teka, anong ginagawa n'yo rito?”

Later on, I realized that even my good friend and classmate at the firm, Cheeky, was in on it. My mom had called her many times in the office trying to orchestrate the conspiracy. She said, later, that it was really hard trying to keep a straight face as I tried to discuss with her (quite seriously) what the elements of perjury are, and how we could mount an adequate defense!

While it was a decidedly tiring day, as it was a decidedly tiring week, it was great seeing people whom I had not seen in a quite a while, people whom I had been missing, people who, indeed, mattered.

I've only had another surprise party in my life (during my 26th birthday), and during both times, I couldn't help but feel the presence of the people that were there, and the good wishes which they brought. It was truly a comfort for the heart.

And so, again, as always, thank you to those who surprised me with their presence and good wishes. To my Mom, Dad and brother who surely instigated the commission of this conspiracy, and who surely found it difficult keeping the details secret; To Eugene, who actively participated in the conspiracy and spread the word of the party; To Cheeky, who tried really hard to keep a straight face at work, as my mom called her to confirm my plans for the day; To my lawschool classmates: Kerwin, Lynette, John, Ting, Perly, Ann, Shalu, Ila and Raffy, and, Gelo and Esel, who have always been there to share celebrations in each other's lives, over the last five years; To my Choirmates, the Rockwell Club, and my Poker Buddies (many of whom are busy preparing for the 2006 Bar): Itin, Leah, Paul, J.A., Gail and Owen, Chris, Simon, Gian and Yumi, who always seem to appear when reminders are desperately needed; To my unlikely law school friends (who stayed until six in the morning!): She and Miong, Xilca, Cayo and Helen, who never seem to have dull moments or heavy silences; and to those who could not attend but were there in spirit, who texted or sent messages, to those who never seem to forget. Maraming salamat!

I was HAD. Pleasantly. Gratefully. More than passing the Bar, I am prouder still to have these people in my life.

The Masks We Wear

2006-04-11T23:35:00.001+08:00

I once told a friend that the difficult thing about growing up is that we become less and less authentic. We build up walls and defense meachanisms to cover-up our insecurities and fears. We smile, and laugh, if only to show the world that everything is okay.

Indeed, there is something admirable about it: in facing the world bravely, in the best way we know how. But once and a while, it would be nice to let down our guard, feel safe, and be ourselves.

That we may be safe harbors to those we truly love, that, this evening, is my prayer.

* * *

Don’t be fooled by me. Don’t be fooled by the mask I wear. For I wear a thousand masks, masks that I am afraid to take off and none of them are really me. Pretending is an art that is second nature with me. I give the impression that I am secure, that everything is fine with me, that confidence is my name and coolness is my game. And that I need no one. But don’t be fooled by me.

My surface may seem smooth, but my surface is my mask. Beneath the mask is the real me—confused, frightened and alone. But I hide this. I don’t want anyone to know it. I panic at the thought of my weakness and fear being exposed. That’s why I create a mask to hide behind— a nonchalant, sophisticated façade to help me pretend, to shield me from the glance that knows. I know that such a glance is my salvation. I know that if it is followed by acceptance, if it’s followed by love, it’s the only thing that will assure me of what I can’t assure myself— that I am worth something, that I am lovable.

But I can’t tell you this. I don’t care. I’m afraid to. I am afraid that your glance will not be followed by acceptance and love. I’m afraid that deep down I’m nothing, that I’m no good and that you will see this and reject me. So I play my desperate game with a mask of assurance on the outside and trembling child on the inside. And my whole life becomes a mask.

I chatter away with surface talk, I tell you everything that is really nothing and nothing of what is everything. But when I go through my routine, don’t be fooled by what I am saying. Please listen carefully and try to hear what I’m not saying, what I’d like to be able to say, what I need to say but can’t.

I want you to know that, I want you to know how important you are to me, how you can be the creator of the real person that is me if you want to. Please want to! You can break down the wall behind which I tremble, you can make me throw away the mask. You can free me from my world of uncertainty and insecurity.

I don’t like hiding behind a mask. I don’t like the superficial game I’m playing. I would really like to be genuine and spontaneous and really me. But you’ve got to help me. You’ve got to hold out your hand even when that’s the last thing I seem to want. Only you can make me throw away the mask. Only you can call me into life again, each time that you are kind and gentle and encouraging, each time you try to understand because you really care. With your sensitivity and sympathy and your power of understanding, you can make me throw away the mask. You can make me live again.

It will not be easy for you. Long years of insecurity and feeling worthless build strong walls. The closer you come to me the more I fight back against you. I fight against the very thing that I need. But I know that love and acceptance are stronger than the highest walls— and that is my hope.

Please try to break down those walls with gentle hands, for a child is very sensitive. Please take my mask away and accept me and love me. I need to be accepted and loved. I am someone you know very well. I am every man and woman you meet. Please take away my mask in love.

Consummatum Est

2006-03-31T14:59:00.000+08:00

Maraming salamat sa inyong pagbati! Having passed the 2005 Bar Examinations is a blessing in itself. Indeed, placing eighth is even a bigger bonus. As the euphoria of the past days is beginning to wane, I, and many of my classmates, are beginning to acknowledge the realization that we are now, finally, lawyers.

While many have been quick to congratulate— and their felicitations are greatly appreciated— some of my more perceptive friends were quick to add that passing [and even placing] in the Bar exams is really quite scary, because it somehow creates expectations which have to be fulfilled. Sabi nga sa Spiderman: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Hopefully, by God's grace, we will not disappoint.

Non nobis, Domine.
Non nobis sed tibi gloria, Domine.

Amen.

The Vocation of Surrender

2006-03-24T09:39:00.000+08:00

People at first could not believe that it had happened, until reports were finally confirmed: Cebu Pacific Air Flight 387 bound for Cagayan de Oro City had crashed on the slopes of Mt. Sumagaya. It was February 2, 1998.

Among those on board the ill-fated flight was Bobby Arévalo Gana.

During the memorial services, people paused and remembered the foolishness that was Bobby Gana’s life. Bobby was a shy and quiet boy, they said. He loved to read and draw. His high school friends remember him most for his stout frame and high-pitched voice, which often became the object of much teasing. They remembered him for his teaching, for living what he taught and having no compulsion to prove himself better than his students. And they remembered him for his work, for his passion in the upliftment of the poor, for the organization that he had helped found, the Sentro ng Alternatibong Lingap Panlegal [Saligan].

You see, Bobby Gana was a lawyer. He graduated fifth in the bar. He knew that he could have started out well with some of the name-firms in the country. Yet, as his friends say, “There wasn’t even a moment of doubt.” He wanted to work with the poor.

In 1997, with lawyer-friends Al Agra, Joy Casis, Butch Abad, and Fr. Joaquin Bernas, SJ, Bobby founded Saligan. Organized primarily to attend to labor disputes, it gradually took on the cases of farmers and peasants. Under Bobby’s direction, Saligan eventually became the biggest alternative law group in the country in terms of the number of full-time lawyers, the number of sectors served, and the number of programs implemented.

Indeed, Bobby Gana’s life would be a very good subject lecture about lawyering and the preferential option for the poor. It almost feels that writing about it only detracts from the powerful eloquence of his life— indeed, an option for the poor is not something talked about, written about, nor planned. It is chosen, and it is lived. Yet reflecting about his life, what strikes me more is the genius of God’s Divine plan: of how he uses man’s talents as a means for the making of His Kingdom here on earth, if we only let Him. Indeed, like Nicodemus, God meets us where we are at.

I am quite certain that Bobby Gana need not have been a lawyer to have done great things for God. Indeed, He would have worked through him just the same. Yet Bobby chose to become a lawyer, and he allowed God to use that privilege to effect change. It seems to me, then, that what is truly important is not so much the doing— for God often takes care of that— but the surrendering. It is allowing God to work through us, however broken, or however imperfect we may be, that the Kingdom of God can find its fulfillment.

One must understand this surrender, however, not as a fatalist escape, a bahala na to the challenges of life. Rather, it is an entrusting of that very life to the “gentle curve of the palm of God’s hand.” Bobby himself said it during his senior retreat in College, “Trust him. . . Trust your life to Him.”

Father Catalino G. Arévelo, SJ, Bobby’s uncle, called this surrender in Bobby a sense of vocation. Fr. Arevalo says, “I have been a religious nearly sixty years now. I know this kind of talk is ‘vocation talk’— ‘Who’s going to do the work?’ ‘People need us to be around for them.’ It means, really, ‘This is where the heart is. This is where I’m called to serve. This is my place.’”

Theologians say that we find God most in the deepest longings of our hearts. Pete Ariston, then still a Jesuit brother, sent me this prayer for a retreat I once attended. It said,

“Nawa’y marinig mo ang pinipintig ng iyong puso
at marinig mo rin ang pinipintig ng puso ni Hesus.
At sa wakas ng lahat, nawa’y maunawaan mo,
na ang pinipintig ng iyong puso
at ang pinipintig ng puso ni Hesus, ay iisa lamang.”

The greatest desire of our heart. For Bobby, it was clear, and the surrendering, absolute. The law, for him, became the means; he merely an instrument. Indeed, this “foolishness” of Bobby’s life humbles us. Yet to say that Bobby is not indispensable in the building of the Kingdom of God is not to negate his sacrifice; rather, the challenge is on us who pray “Your Kingdom Come”— upon whose shoulders must fall the share of those who have been called away. “And so we must join hands,” as Fr. Bernas says. “The struggle is still ours.” To honor and remember Bobby, then, is to live out our own surrender, to be true to our own vocation.

[Kay M., na nagkaroon ng lakas ng loob.]

My Life

2006-03-19T15:33:00.000+08:00

A good friend and colleague of mine at work said that the past couple of months for her have been an emotional roller-coaster ride. Having started work for the first time in January, and with the results of the Bar in less than two weeks' time, she observed how on some days she would be riding high upon the crest of her new-found independence, and on other days, she would be wallowing in the dolldrums of ennui and self-doubt.

With certain recent realizations and disappointments foisted upon me yet again— and with the ominous shadow of the Bar results creeping ever so slowly into our collective consciousness— I am beginning to understand what riding the same emotional roller coaster is like. Perhaps the interesting thing about the journey, though, is that I have an acute awareness that I am navigating the course alone, both in the ups and in the downs. Not that it is a particularly pathetic or disturbing thing. But the soul occassionally seeks solace in the comfort of familiar presence and comfortable silences.

Riding this emotional roller-coaster reminded me of the movie shown way back in 1993 starring Michael Keaton and Nicole Kidman. Directed by Bruch Joel Rubin, the movie is called My Life. It tells of how the main character, Bob Jones, discovers that he has lung cancer and has only months left to live. He sets out to videotape his life's acquired wisdom for his child yet to be born, and ends up on a voyage of self-discovery and reconciliation. While the plot of the movie was quite contrived, pulling as it did on the audience's heartstrings, the movie pulled me in with a strange nostalgic urgency, as though asking me what I would do if I found out I only had months left to live.

The last scene of the film was particularly memorable for me as it served as a metaphor for the manner with which Bob Jones faced his dying: riding a roller-coaster. Having made peace with death, he is seen slowly ascending that first highest hill, the sun bright, the wind in his hair. And just as the roller coaster dips for that first drop, Bob, tightly grippng the restraining bars, lets go, raising his arms high in the air in defiant surrender. And the movie ends.

Sitting here in Starbucks on this gloriously vibrant Sunday afternoon, rushing an opinion due first thing tomorrow morning, I look out in envy at the cars speeding past the Katipunan Avenue, with seeming purpose and direction, filled with families and friends. Riding on the crest of yet another drop, I wish that, like Bob Jones, I could just also defiantly let go.

* * *

Tan ahora sé que está finalmente, acabado definitivo. Cómo es extraño que he estado manteniendo esta idea que podemos todavía ser los amigos y que todavía le amo. Pero la verdad es que te quiero, o pienso que lo hago, pero que no debo más. Y por eso, voy.

Me ahora confunden y se pierden, pero manejaré. El vivir sin su presencia tomará cierto aprender. Pero las circunstancias lo requieren. Cuidado de la toma, siempre.

Eruplanong Papel

2006-03-12T22:50:00.000+08:00

I wrote before that Angelo V. Suárez's else it was purely girls was a worthwhile read. I still think it is. But now that a friend of mine had gifted me a copy of his first work, the nymph of MTV, I am convinced that, indeed, the first one is the charm. While else it was purely girls was sonorous and playful in its use of language, the nymph of MTV was more meaningful and subdued, focusing on the image rather than the language. While else it was purely girls gave me a pleasant shock, the nymph of MTV drew me in slowly, thoughtfully posing question and connotation without being too self-conscious.

I post two poems from the collection; the first, because it spoke of the rain which I love; and the second, because it validated a distant memory.

fragment 3

Now I understand why people associate sadness with rain.

Sadness isn't rain: it's the umbrella that won't open when
you need it, the clogged pipes that keep Dapitan flooded, the
joke your literature professor won't be able to say because
classes got suspended.

Sadness most of all is you bedridden and feverish and sick,
is you unable to meet up with me past class, your sweat
trickling from forehead to pillow already soaked with tears.

At the Airport

It was a speck of white in a flutter of green
when the wind swept the ground of its fallen
leaves. I remember it clearly now: the deftness

of each fold, the accuracy of angles,
even the weight and smoothness of paper,
its proper height and breadth. The breeze

was finicky, my brother used to say,
when it came to launching paper planes in the air—
everything just had to be exact, symmetrical,

everything had to be perfect. He would ask me
to get the materials needed and lay them complete
on the old narra dining table— a sheet of legal-sized

bond paper, a cutter, a pair of scissors, a 12-inch ruler,
even a glass of cold calamansi juice— 1 teaspoon
of sugar, no ice— or a hot mug of coffee to warm

his stomach. Perhaps this is what planes are for,
those made out of paper: a memento of sors,
a souvenir, a folded keepsake, to keep an absence

less than total.

* * *

Paano nga ba magpalipad ng Eruplanong Papel?

[Thanks, stuckie. Yes, it should never be about issues.]

Left Unsaid

2006-03-07T23:09:00.000+08:00

as originally posted on Vannie's blog, A Daydreamer's World:

The pear leaves redden, the cicada's song is done

The pear leaves redden, the cicada's song is done.

Wind high up in the River of Heaven,

flute sounds: cold and cutting.

A chill on the mat, the water-clock dripping.

Who taught the swallows to make so light of parting?

At the edge of the grass the insects moan,

as autumn's frosts congeal.

Stale wine: awakening,

I can't remember when you left.

How much of what I really feel is left unsaid?

Night after night moon dawns

upon my pearl-embroidered screen.

by Ou-yang Hsiu, translated from the Chinese by J.P. Seaton.

From Love and Time, published by Copper Canyon Press.

Funny how we fail to say the things we ought to say when we really ought to say them. And funny how we realize that we ought to have said them when saying them no longer matters.

Inebriated and tired from yet another insane night of poker, the topic of conversation turned to regret, and how it's the most wrenching feeling in the world. Indeed, why we fail to say the things we ought to say when we should escapes me. Fear? Anger? Pride? So much wasted opportunity. Nasa huli ang pagsisisi.

And so we try to make-up, repeating the words over and over again. We post blogs, we make press releases to friends, we write poems and journals and stories, hoping that somehow, our repetitive words will find wings and reach the person to whom it should have been uttered to.

But until we get to stand before that person to tell him/her— in flesh and blood— what we really wanted to say, we will be always be restless, wondering, what if.

Untitled

2006-03-01T23:20:00.000+08:00

I cannot tell you
how the mirror broke
on the floor yesterday
or how I was cut and did nothing
to stop the bleeding.

What I can tell you, though,
is that sitting there
in the darkest corner of my room,
watching as the blood
turn into a murky brown,
I realized that I was alone,
and that you were not there.

A State of Emergency

2006-02-24T23:05:00.000+08:00

[T]he law is a living thing. It made us free and it keeps us free.
Sometimes it gets twisted around by people for their own purposes.
Sometimes it makes mistakes, sometimes big mistakes.
But in the end, the law prevails for the just.
Sometimes, it takes a while.

from the movie, The Majestic

Early this morning, the President of the Republic, over a live televised address to the nation, declared a State of Emergency, invoking her powers as Commander-in-Chief, thereby calling out all the armed forces “to suppress lawless violence, invasion and rebellion,” as clearly set forth in the Constitution.

Following months of political uncertainty, the forces opposed to her administration sought for the perfect opportunity to rise up once again in an attempt to effect her immediate ouster. The attempt would have been successful, I think, had it not been for the vigilance of her intelligence personnel, who, it seems, have gotten into the habit of tapping telephone lines and reading through personal correspondences.

Already, the days leading up to the declaration were rife with coup rumors and political defections. All these came to a head early this morning, on the 20th Anniversary of the EDSA People Power Revolution in 1986, when militant forces began to mass in front of the EDSA Shrine only hours after several high-ranking military officials were relieved of duty following the discovery of a well-orchestrated plot to overthrow the government.

The military and police forces acted swiftly, dispersing the assembly with nightsticks and water cannons. Several of the rallyists were promptly arrested, among whom included a prominent columnist and a sociology professor. They were charged with inciting to sedition.

Whether the President was justified in declaring this State of Emergency, and whether the mechanisms which have been set in motion were warranted under the circumstances will perhaps be the subject of much social and legal debate in the coming days. The wording of the declaration itself is open to much speculation and interpretation. Some have commented that, listening to the President's declaration, a feeling of déjà vu came over them, as though they were transported back to September 21, 1972, when the dictator declared martial law. Others have wondered why Section 17, Art. XII of the Constitution— the provision which allows “the State” to take over and direct the operations of “public utilities and other business affected with public interest”— was invoked, when certainly, such power was unnecessary for the immediate restoration of order in the Metropolis. Some in the media have said that this State of Emergency is merely being used by the President as a pretext to, among other purposes, silence the press and discipline media outfits perceived to be against her plan of governance. Her Secretary of National Defense has already declared that the government will soon issue guidelines to be followed by all media practitioners, with any violation met with swift legal action.

* * *

I will not, at this point, add my personal commentary or opinion on the actions taken by the President today. I think more qualified and credible legal minds will take care of this as the days progress. I will, however, share some insights which came to me as I was watching the evening news, listening to statements of police officers warning unruly demonstrators that those who chose to defy the military dispersals would be arrested without warrant and detained indefinitely without charge. The statement, of course, is not only misleading, but carelessly and incorrectly made. To this, a friend and colleague of mine earlier commented how many of our citizens simply are not aware of their Constitutionally protected rights. To this, I replied: not only are they unaware, but I suspect, they are also very unappreciative, or even apathetic.

Watching the news this evening, I was again reminded of one of Jim Carrey's more recent movies, one which made me appreciate a bit more this Constitution which seems to have been over-invoked by people who do not seem to understand its essence.

The movie that came to mind was The Majestic, written by Michael Sloane and directed by Frank Darabond. The movie tells of a Hollywood writer, Peter Appleton, who, after having been pursued by the United States Congress on suspicions of being a communist, loses his memory and finds himself in Lawson, California, a small town still recovering from deaths suffered during the Second World War. Peter is mistaken for Luke Trimble, a soldier awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously, whom many believed to have been killed in the war. Not knowing his identity, Peter takes on Luke's life and gives the melancholic town a renewed sense of hope. This hope, however, is shattered when Peter is discovered by the U.S. Congress and served a subpoena to appear before the Committee on Un-American Affairs.

Peter is given a package by Adele, Luke's fiancée, before boarding a train back to Los Angeles and to the Congressional Hearing. On the train, Peter opens and finds a copy of the Constitution of the United States. Tucked between its pages is the last letter written by Luke to Adele before his death:

“Please do not mourn my passing but move on and live your life to the fullest in order to give mine meaning and to honor the cause we’re over here fighting to achieve. When bullies rise up the rest of us have to beat them down, whatever the cost. It’s a simple idea I suppose but one worth giving everything for. The only thought that saddens me, aside from failing at our task, is the thought of never seeing you again, not holding you, not seeing our children grow, now spending the passing years with you. But if I should not come back know that I will never truly leave you. Should you walk years from now on a beautiful Spring day and feel a warm breeze graze your cheek that warm breeze will be me giving you a kiss. Remember finally above all that— I love you. Luke.”

During the Congressional Hearing, Peter is advised by his attorney to read a statement effectively admitting his communist leanings, and as a sign of his repentance, offers names of other erstwhile communists which the Committee could also investigate. Peter, however, hesitates and ultimately falters. He folds the statement, and instead says:

“But it occurs to me that there’s a bigger issue here today than whether I’m a Communist . . . Fact is, I’ve never been a man of great conviction. I never saw the percentage in it and quite frankly I suppose . . . lacked of courage. You see I’m not like Luke Trimble. He had the market cornered on those things. I never met the guy but I feel like I’ve got to know him. The thing is, I can’t help wondering what he’d say if he were standing here right now.

You know I think he’d probably tell you the America represented in this room is not the America he died defending. I think he’d tell you your America is bitter and cruel and small. I know for a fact that his America was big, bigger than you can imagine with a wide open heart where every person has a voice even if you don’t like what they have to say. If he were here I wonder how you’d explain, if you could explain to him what happened to his America. . .”

The Committee Chairman begins to bang his gavel to silence Peter. “Mr. Appleton you are skating on the very thin edge of contempt.”

Peter responds, “That’s the first thing I’ve heard hear today that I could completely agree with.” Peter's lawyer then announces that he is invoking the Fifth Amendment, his right against self-incrimination. Peter, however, pushes him aside. “The fifth Amendment is out of the question. But there is another amendment I’d like to invoke. I wonder if anyone here is familiar with it. . .” Peter then begins to read from the copy of the Constitution Adele gave him.

“Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion. or prohibit from free exercise thereof, or abridge the freedom of speech or of the press or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble to petition the government for redress of grievances.”

Peter continues, “That’s the first amendment, Mr. Chairman. It’s everything we’re about. If only we’d live up to it; it’s the most important part of the contract every citizen has with this country. . . And even though the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are just pieces of paper with signatures on them, they're the only contracts we have that are definitely not subject to renegotiation. Not by you Mr. Chairman, not by you Mr. Clyde, not by anyone, ever. Too many people have paid for this contact in blood.” Peter then holds up the Medal of Honor given posthumously to Luke. He continues, “People like Luke Trimble and all the sons of Lawson, California.” Peter pauses, and says, thoughtfully, “When you get right down to it that’s all I really have to say to this committee,” and he just stands up and leaves.

* * *

I remember coming out of the movie house (I even remember it to be at the Alabang Town Center), somber and chastened, thinking: if I was called upon to go to war, to defend this way of life, to die for the ideals enshrined in our Constitution, would I? The honest answer, of course, is that I would not. I would not because I did not pay for this contract, these eighteen Articles, with my own freedom and my own blood. It was not my Constitution.

Watching the protesters battle the riot police on television, braving water cannons and nightsticks, I wondered whether they were fighting for their Constitution. Whether they were on the wrong side or the right one, I felt a quiet admiration for their persistence, if only to say that somehow, when bullies rise up, some of us have to come forward to beat them back down, whatever the cost.

Indeed, it’s a simple idea, but I suppose it is one worth giving everything for.

Starry, Starry Night

2006-02-21T23:18:00.000+08:00

Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen
They're not listening still
Perhaps they never will

from Starry, Starry Night by Don McLean

He sat on the bench beneath a darkening dusk sky, at a place so familiar to him once upon a time. The sounds of the day were slowly fading, absorbed by the nocturnal noises of muffled footsteps and closing doors. The bells of the nearby church tolled the time, and he knew that soon, he too had to leave. But the melancholy evening crept up like a hidden hand behind the rushing darkness. He had no choice but to yield.

He was alone then, naturally, coming from a long day of useless worry and still more useless work. He felt utterly defeated, beat up, wasted, feeling as though breathing itself were a stupendous effort, feeling as though his life would unravel at the slightest beating of his heart.

Then the voices came again, stern and certain, like a drum beat rising in his ears:

"Your life is a joke."

"You were just a waste of my time."

The words fell like a hammer to the anvil: crashing, loud, heavy. And yet he could not speak, he could not say a word, because he knew all of it was true, he wanted to believe it was true, if only to let her stay.

* * *

The rage with which he tried to take Paul's life drove him too to take the razor to himself, slicing off his ear in a sign of repentance and frustration. He knew that he was losing his mind. Seeking for an unrealized cure, he turned to the Monastery of Saint-Paul de Mausole, in the southern city of Saint Rémy de Provence, a few kilometers from the Mediterranean Sea.

He had found some stability in his life there in Saint-Paul, admitting himself into the asylum, and converting an adjacent cell into a studio. He did not have much to do during the day, and thus devoted himself entirely to his painting, the source of his greatest passion and his greatest folly. Later, he was allowed to venture further afield, taking easel and oils into the French countryside, painting wheat fields, olive groves, cypress trees.

And the sunflowers, oh, the sunflowers, they were everywhere, its yellow contrasted only by the yellow of the sun itself.

He knew, of course, that his mind teetered on the brink of oblivion. And so, with the purposeful fervor of a man without time, he poured his soul into his passion, uncertain whether the exercise itself was what kept the demons at bay, or whether it was these demons which provided him his elusive inspiration. The oblation, in any event, was absolute: he was risking his life for it, and his reason had half-foundered. Executing painting after painting, the darkness of his mind only fuelled the brightness of his colors.

The episodes, of course, were getting graver and more frequent. Only recently, he had tried to kill himself by swallowing a bottle of paint. It was poetic, he thought: the medium of his life would also be the instrument of his death. Naturally, the doctors would have none of it. They confiscated his brushes and his paints, leaving him with only charcoal and paper. He had to make due with black and white scribbles.

But the colors within him could not be suppressed; the dark demons that spoke words and mocked him needed to find form. And so he demanded to be let out, released, set lose into the country side that he loved. And in the midst of that dementia, in the play of light and shadow in which moved his mind and his soul, he executed his most evocative works yet, one after another, until he knew that he was almost entirely spent.

It was on one of those dark evenings when he felt the demons come. It started with a shaking of the hand, a dimming of the sight. And then the voices would whisper, all around him, echoing through his spartan quarters, reverberating in his mind.

“Vincent,” they said. “Vincent!” persistent and macabre.

He clutched his head, almost as a reflex, leaning upon his easel. No, I will not listen, he told himself. I will not go. And with supreme effort, he fought them, he fought the voices, now, closing in upon him. He had nowhere else to go. He unlatched the door, and ran out into the darkness, his robe fluttering in the chill of that pregnant night, out of the asylum, into the garden, out onto the sunflower fields, grey now from the moon. The gentleness of the provençal evening was shattered by his clumsy footfalls, scrapping the well-worn path which led into the city, all the while wailing his protests against the voices that did not leave.

“Please leave me alone,” he shouted. “I have nothing to give you!”

“I know you have nothing to give us,” a voice answered.

“Certainly, you have nothing to give us,” another followed.

“You do not have anything to give us,” echoed a third.

“Please, what do you want of me?” he screamed, loosing his footing on the rocky soil. He fell and struggled to get up. But he was too exhausted. He lay panting on the ground.

“Such a waste, Vincent, it was all such a waste!” the voice intoned.

“No, no,” he said, persistently, defiantly, yet with hardly any breath left in him. “You are wrong! You are all wrong!” he said, almost in a whisper. “I have not wasted anything!” He was breathing hard now, his mind close to breaking.

Then suddenly, the voices vanished, fading into the wind like exorcised spirits.

He closed his eyes for an instant, and savored the moment of release. He opened them to the sight of the city far into the horizon, fast asleep. In the shadows, he could make out the shape of the church steeple, following with his eyes its pointed spire, and tracing its outline to the heavens. Slowly, he tilted his head upwards, and almost immediately, the glorious sky above him exploded in a display of orange and yellow. He looked without blinking, amazed at all its splendor, as though the heavens had broken open and given up its treasures of amber and diamond. In his mind’s eye, he saw the darkness move in a swirl of energy, the stars pulsating against a velvet that was restful yet alive.

In that moment of epiphany, he clumsily struggled to his feet and rushed back to his cell, fuelled, it seemed, by the very stars themselves. He flung away an unfinished canvas, and in the fervor of that lucid insanity, described from memory what he saw in his mind. With deft brush strokes and deliberate lines, he traced onto the canvas the indignation and indifference of his unseeing world, pouring his pain and loneliness and insecurity in one magnificent instant, so that his soul, from off the canvass, seemed to take flight, escaping to the heavens, in that most fantastic of starry nights.

* * *

As he walked from the bench toward his car, he told himself that it was summer once again, the sky still bright even after the setting of the sun. Already, he saw the first hints of starlight filter through the dirty darkness, as the nighttime fought with day, and he wondered how many people, at that precise moment, were looking heavenwards also, like he was.

How little we are understood, he thought, and then, he continued walking.

Suddenly, he began to hear another voice, much fainter, although more familiar, because it was his own.

In the secret corners of his mind, he knew that this was an inevitable conversation, one which spoke an unspeakable truth which he had kept in his heart, one which he himself did not want to hear spoken. But the voice, as persistent as the filtering starlight, needed to find expression. He therefore silenced himself with the resolve to listen, tenuous and feeble though that resolve, at that time, may have been. So that, as he reached his car parked at the other side of the road, he heard no other sound, at last, except the chiming of the bells.

The Far Side of Philosophy

2006-02-10T12:55:00.000+08:00

TAGUAN, TAGUAN: isang landas ng pag-uunawa sa Tao at ang kalagayan niya sa mundo

2006-02-10T10:22:00.000+08:00

Tagu-taguan maliwanag ang buwan. Tayo’y maglaro ng tagu-taguan.
Ispel yes, Y-E-S. Ispel no, N-O, and out you go.
Wala sa likod wala sa harap wala sa kanan wala sa kaliwa.
Tagu-taguan maliwanag ang buwan. Tayo’y maglaro ng tagu-taguan. . . .

Game? Game na ba?
GAME!

PANIMULA

Lumaki kaming magpipinsang naglalaro ng taguan. Sa malawak na hardin n gaming lola ditto sa New Manila, sa lilim ng mga mababangong calachuchi at matatayog na mangga, sa liwanag ng maamong buwan at malamig na hangin, natatandaan io kaming nagtatakbuhan at nagtatawanan, inaawit ang awit ng taguan na inawit na ng napakaraming bata kung saan-saan, ngayon at magpakailanman. “Tagu-taguan, maliwanag ang buwan. Tayo’y maglaro ng tagu-taguan. . . .” At natatandaan ko kung paano kami nagtatago sa mga sanga ng calachuchi, o sa likod ng mga malalaking bato. Pinipigil naming ang aming paghinga sa tuwing dadaan ang tayâ. At natatandaan ko rin tuwing ako ang nagiging tayâ, mabilis ang pintig ng puso, hinuhulaan ang pinagtataguan ng bawat isa— dito kaya o doon, sabay bagsak— “Boom-Noel-save!” at sabay takbo, unahan sa base. At uulit na naman ang laro ng taguan.

Ngayong binabalikan ko ang halos dalawang taon kong pagtatampisaw sa tubig ng Pilosopiya, nabubuhay sa aking alaala itong paglalaro ng taguan, sapagka’t nagsisilbi itong isang tumpak na talinhaga sa kung paano ko natutunang tanawin ang Pilosopiya, ang tao, at ang kanyang kalagayan dito sa mundo.

Ang tao ay naglalaro ng taguan, nagtatago at naghahanap. Bilang naghahanap, tayâ siya. Dala ng udyok ng pagkamangha, nakikipagsapalaran siya sa daigdig, tumutuklas at pilit na ibinababad ang kanyang sarili sa kahiwagahan at lalim ng buong sangkameronan. Ang buong Pilosopiya ngayon ay masasabing isang bukod-tanging gawain ng pagtuklas at pag-uunawa sa buong karanasan ng tao dito sa mundo— at kung ano ngang mga hiwaga ang kanyang natuklasan! Ngunit kasabay ng pagtataya at paghahanap, nagtatarin rin siya. Madalas siyang umaatras sa pag-aalinlangan sapaka’t nakikita rin niya ang katotohanan na, kasabay ng hiwagang ito, siya’y isang limitadong nilalang, at ang mundong kanyang ginagalawan ay nag-aanyong masakit at mapaglinlang.

Nasasaktan ang tao, kaya’t nagkukubli siya. Sinasara niya ang kanyang sarili at nabubuhay sa loob ng isang konsepto, minsan pa nga sa loob mismo ng mga magaganda at matatayog na salita at ideya ng Pilosopiya. Sapat na sa kanyang tumayo sa pampang ng swimingpul ni Padre Ferriols, wala nang pagnanais pang kumilos o lumundag.

Sa dalawang taon ng aming pamimilosopiya, pinagmunihan namin ang napakaraming magagandang sila at katotohanan: pagmamahal, pag-asa, Meron, pakikipagkapwa. Ngunit sa harap ng hapis na ito, isang hapis na tumatagos sa mismong kaluluwa ng bawat tao at tila nakahabi sa misong istruktura ng lahat ng pagmemeron, paano pa nga ba tayo maaaring mamilosopiya, kung ang pilosopiya nga ay sinasabing mismong nagpapalaya? Tila baga, nabibihag tayo sa loob ng kawalan at kadiliman.

Sinasabi ni Marcel, sa kanyang Balangkas ng Isang Penomenolohiya at Isang Metapisika ng Pag-asa, na:

Kapag lalong hindi nararanasan na ang buhay ay pagkabihag, lalong nawawala ang pagka-angkop ng diwa na makita ang pagsinag ng liwanag na parang natatabingan, mahiwaga, na bago pa magsimula ang anumang pag-aanalisis ay batid na natin na siyang tahanan ng pag-asa.

Ngunit ano ang nais ipahiwatig ng paghahalong ito ng pag-asa at kadiliman? Sa pag-uunawa sa kinalalagyan ng tao bilang isang tentasyon tungo sa dalawang dulo ng kalwalhatian at kawalan, paghahanap at taguan, tila nauudyok tayong magtanong sa kung ano ang halaga ng Pilosopiya sa harap ng hapis ng sangkatauhan at sangkameronan. Sa isang nilalang na napapasaloob sa kadiliman ng hindi-pagka-alam, kinakasama ang malagim na mukha ng hapis at kawalan, tila ang kasagutan sa tanong na ito ang siyang mag-uudyok sa kanyang magpatuloy sa landas ng pagtuklas, o ipikit ang mga mata, isuko ang pagkatao, at magkubli sa tiyak ngunit malamig na moog ng kanyang sarili.

ANG TAONG TAYÂ

Isang hiwaga sa tao ang kakayahan niyang mag-isip at maka-alam. Isa itong kaalaman na hindi niya agad natatarok, dala marahil ng kapayakan ng katotohanan nito. Ngunit sa panahong namumulatan nga siya, tila isang tahimik na lindol ang nagaganap: para bagang maliit na batang unang binubuksan ang kanyang mga mata sa kahiwagahan ng kanyang kapaligiran. Tumatalab sa kanya, hindi lamang ang kanyang pinagtutuunan ng pansin, kung hindi ang mismong sarili niyang tumutuon at umuunawa. Alam niyang siya’y nakaka-alam.

Itong pagkamulat sa “Ako” ng tao ay sinasabayan din ng isang kamalayang “Nagtataka ako.” Itong pagtatakang ito ang siyang puso ng dinamismo ng kanyang isip na maka-alam sa lahat: sa pagbabalik-tiklop sa kanyang sarili, at sa paglabas niya sa lahat ng pumapaligid sa kanya. Laging tumatalbog sa bawat pader ng hindi-pagka-alam, lagi siyang naghahanap ng sapat na kahulugan na umaayon sa kanyang isipan.

Ngunit ang pagkamanghang ito ay hindi isang pagtuklas sa malayo at kailâ, kung ‘di sa karaniwan na’t araw-araw nang nakikita. Sa mga salita ni Gallagher, hindi ito isang kaguluhan ng isip, o isang kadiliman, kung ‘di isang “pagtatalaban ng malapit at malayo” — ang pagtanaw sa dating daigdig na gamit ang panibagong mga mata at sariwang pag-uunawa. Sa ganitong paraan niya nararanasan na siya’y umiikot sa dilim. Alam niyang nakaka-alam siya, ngunit ang kaalaman niya ay panandalian lamang. Kaya’t patuloy pa rin ang pagtatanong. Pagtuloy pa rin ang paghahanap. Tulad ng bata sa taguan.

Sa ganitong paraan ng paghahanap at pagtataka nakikilala ng tao ang meron: hindi bilang isang babasahin o konsepto, kung ‘di bilang dalisay na karanasan na natatambad sa simpleng akto ng pagtingin. Isa itong pagbulaga ng meron. Sa kilos ng kanyang isip, mula sa karanasan, natatauhan siya sa isang sinunang apirmasyon ng kanyang kalagayan bilang tao: merong meron, at nasa meron ako!

Ganito nga ang natutunan namin sa pag-aaral namin ng Pilosopiya ng Tao. Dito, una kaming hinimok na kilalanin ang aming sinaunang kakayahan na umunawa, isang pag-uunawa na tila isang uri rin ng pagtingin. Hinimok kaming kilalanin at danasin ang kailaliman ng meron, isang laging dinamikong pagtatagpo-pagpapakita. Kaya nga marahil isang pambungad sa metapisika ang siyang ginagamit na paraan upang maunawaan itong Pilosopiya ng Tao— sapagka’t minumulat kami sa katotohanan na kami nga’y mga taong umuunawa (res cogitans) at may kakayahang mamilosopiya, at ang inuunawa at pinagmumunihan namin ay ang mismong meron.

Sa aming patuloy na pagmamasid sa aming kapaligiran, sa pagbababad sa aming sarili sa kailaliman ng meron, nahihinuha namin na kami’y bahagi lamang ng isang higit na malawak na katotohanan. Tulad ng tao na may udyok na lumabas sa sarili at makipagkapwa, may likas na kilos din ang bawat nagmemeron na magpaalam at magpakilala. Sa pag-apaw na ito, nakikilala ang bawat nagmemeron, at mula dito ang lahat-lahat ay bumubuo ng isang kabuoan na laging nakikipagtalastasan, laging nagpapa-alam at nagpapakita. Sa loob ng komunidad ng mga meron gumagalaw ang tao. Napag-iisa ng isang malalim na pakikibahagi sa akto ng meron (esse), nakakabuo ng isang malalim na kaayusan ang mga nagkaka-iba ngunit nagkakaparehong mga umiiral. Natatambad namin na, kagaya nga ng sinasabi ng mga mistiko at matatanda, siya at ang mga bituwin ay iisa.

Mula rito, makikita ang mismong disenyo ng lahat ng sansinukob bilang isang tumutungo sa kabuoan, kaisahan, at katotohanan. Kagaya ng nakita ni Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, mababatid din na sa lahat ng bagay ay tumutungo sa isang masidhing personalisasyon na nakakahanap ng kaganapan sa mismong pagmemeron ng tao. Sa ganitong paraan, isang salikop ng pag-iisip ang lahat-lahat: nagsisimula sa pagkamulat sa kanyang isipan, lumalabas ang tao tungo sa lahat ng ibang nagmemeron, ngunit pagkatapos ay bumabalik muli sa kahiwagahan at kahalagahan ng kanyang sarili.

Hindi ito nagtatapos dito, sapagka’t sa pagkilala sa sarili bilang persona, nagigising rin ang tao sa isang katotohanang siya mismo ay tumutungo sa isang higit na persona— ang Mismong Meron na kinakailangang pinagmulan ng lahat, lampas sa lahat, ngunit natatablan pa rin ng isipan. Dito sa Mismong Meron na ito nahahanap ang prinsipyo ng pagkakaisa na tinutungohan ng buong metapisika, at maging epistemolohiya at etika, at sa Pilosopiya ng Relihiyon ay nakilala namin bilang isang personal na Absolutong Ikaw. Sa pagkilala sa katangiang maaaring-hindi-magmeron ng lahat-lahat, tila baga tinutulak ang tao ng kanyang kalooban na tanggapin, bilang isang makatwirang katotohanan, ang pag-iral ng isang ubod-tigib-apaw na Meron na nagpa-iral, at patuloy na nagpapa-iral sa lahat.

Mula rito, nakikilala ng tao ang kanyang lugar at tungkulin sa cosmos bilang nilalang na inuunawaa ang lahat ng nagpapaunawa upang makapagsilbi siyang tagapaggitna sa pagitan ng meron ng panahon at ng Meron na Magpakailanman. Sa kanyang udyok na ilikom ang lahat ng nagmemeron sa kanyang kalooban at alaala, sa kanyang kakayahang pumaloob sa esensya ng bawat isa at ng lahat-lahat, itinataas niya ang lahat ng sanlinikha sa isang uri ng paglampas na siyang nagiging paraan ng pagbalik ng buong sangkameronan sa Kanya na kanilang pinagmulan (reditus). Kaya nga naman nagkakaroon ng panibago at mas malalim na kahulugan ang mga katagang, “Dumanas ka! Tumingin ka!” sapagka’t sa pagdanas at pagtingin na ito natutupad ng tao ang kanyang tungkulin at tawag na pumagitna sa ngayon at sa magpakailanman.

Sa pagkilala niya sa kanyang sarili bilang tao at sa pagtupad niya sa kanyang tungkulin bilang bahagi ng buong sangkameronan, ipinagdiriwang ngayon ng tao ang kanyang pag-iral. Gumagalaw siya sa galak ng pagtuklas, muli’t-muling dumaranas, umuunawa, at ibinababad ang sarili sa kahiwagahan ng meronng kanyang ginagalawan.

ANG TAONG NAGTATAGO

Sa pakikipagsapalarang ito, nakikita rin ng tao na, kasabay ng paghahagilap niya sa buong kahiwagahan ng meron, isa isang limitadong nilalang. Kinikilala niya na isa siyang meron-na-tumutungo-sa-kamatayan. At bagama’t ninanais niyang tumupad sa isang malalim na pagkakaisa sa kanyang kapwa, sa buong sanlinikha, at maging sa mismong Meron, gumagalaw pa rin ang isang halos hindi-maipaliwanag na pagkakahiwalay, sa isang “basag na daigdig” na umiikot sa loob ng isang madilim na hindi-pagka-alam. Sa pagtanaw sa kanyang mismong kasaysayan, nakikita niya ang paulit-ulit na pag-uwi sa pagwawala, at nagtatanong siya kung meron ba talagang halaga ang pagmemeron ng lahat. Nagdududa siya.

Sa kanyang aklat na Night, inilarawan ni Elie Wiesel ang damdaming ito.

Bukas ang aking mga mata, at nakita kong ako’y nag-iisa— sa isang daigdig na walang Diyos at walang tao. Walang pag-ibig o pagpapatawad. Naging abo na lamang ako. . . .

Nakikilala ngayon ang isang uri ng pakikipagtunggali at gumagalaw sa mismong istruktura ng meron— ang dinamismo na lumampas at tumuklas, sa isang banda, at ang tentasyon na magwala, at manatiling kulob, sa kabila. Kasabay nito ang isang kilos ng hapis na kahirapan sa lahat ng nagmemeron, mula sa pinakamaliit na nilalang hanggang sa kalooban ng tao. Lahat naghihirap, lahat tila naglalaho. Nagtatanong ang tao: maaari nga kayang lumampas, magtiwala, umibig sa harap ng lahat ng hapis na ito na tila nananalatay sa lahat ng nagmemeron? Nalilito ang tao, sapagka’t tila isa itong kababalaghan na hindi kailanman matatablan ng kanyang isipan. Sa kanyang pagtatanong, wala siyang natatanggap na sagot kung ‘di isang malamig na katahimikan.

Kung kaya’t sa kanyang hindi-pagka-alam, sa hapis ng kanyang nararamdaman, lumilikha siya ng ga moog na matibay at matatag. Nagtatago siya. Sa isang paraan, pinapatay niya ang kakayahan niyang umunawa at mag-isip, at nabubuhay sa pagwawala. Dito sa loob ng kaharian ng kadiliman, tinatanong niya kung bakit pa kailangang magpatuloy, kung uuwi lang din lang sa absurdo ang kanyang pag-iral. Nahulog na nga siya sa desperasyon, at sa pakiwari niya’y wala na ang kanya’y sasalo.

Sa taong nagtatago, walang ibang umiiral sa kanya kung ‘di ang kanyang sarili. Pinutol na niya ang kanyang pagbaling sa meron at sa kanyang kapwa. Malinis ang daigdig niya, ngunit hungkag. Gayunpaman, hindi niya nalalaman na ito’y hungkag. Hindi niya nalalaman na sarado ang kanyang sarili.

Ano ngayon ang maaaring makapagbuwag sa mga pader na ito ng pagtatago? Ano ngayon ang maaaring maiharap na sagot sa mismong paghihirap na ito ng sangkameronan, ngayong tila naitulak na ang buong sanlinikha na harapin ang maselang kondisyon ng kanyang pag-iral? Ano kaya ang wastong atitud na kailangang pairalin sa mga nahulog sa loob ng kadilimang ito?

Sa isang paraan, maaaring ituring ang hapis bilang patunay sa pagka-absurdo ng lahat. Sa ganitong atitud, nagiging isang bilangguan ang buhay, isang nausea na hindi maaaring takasan, kagaya ng paningin ni Sartre. Dito, ang tao ay nananatiling naghahanap ng kahulugan, ngunit sa kanyang paghahanap, nakikita niya na ang lahat ay kawalan na hinding-hindi matatablan ng kanyang isipan, o kung hindi man, isusuko niya ang mismong kakayahan niyang lumampas sa kanyang hapis para tanggapin na lamang ang buhay bilang absurdo at walang kahulugan.

Dito, nag-aanyong Sisipo ang tao na pinagninilayan ang kanyang pasaning bato. Sa pagkamulat sa kanyang absurdong kalagayan, nagkakamit ang tao ng isang absurdong tagumpay. Kinikilala niya ang kawalang-kahulugan ng kanyang pag-iral, at maging ang pag-iral ng lahat-lahat, at sa panahong ito ng pagkamulat, humihigit siya sa kanyang bato. Ngunit babalik uli siya sa baba ng bundok upang itulak muli paakyat ang bato, upang gumulong muli paibaba, para itulak muli paakyat.

Ngunit sa kabilang panig naman, maaaring tingnan ang paghihirap at hapis na ito bilang isang pagkakataon ng pagdadalisay o paghahandog ng sarili. Hindi niya tinatanggap ang pagka-absurdo ng kanyang karanasan; nananalig siya sa nakatago nitong kahulugan. Sa gitna ng kadiliman, hindi niya isinusuko ang kanyang sarili, bagkus, patuloy na umaasa.

Tungkol sa kadilimang ito, sinasabi ni Simone Weil:

Sa loob ng kadiliman, walang maaaring ibigin. Ngunit ang higit na kahindik-hindik ay kung, sa gitna ng kadiliman, mismong pinipili ng taong huwag magmahal, magiging ganap na ang pagkawala ng Diyos. Kailangang patuloy na magmahal ang tao sa loob ng kawalan, o kung hindi ay gustuhin man lamang na magmahal. . . . Pagkatapos, isang araw, darating ang Diyos para ipakita ang kanyang sarili at ibahagi sa taong ito ang mismong kagandahang ng mundo. . . .

Marahil sa pagsasa-walang-laman ng tao lamang siya maaaring mapuno muli. Ang taong tinatanaw ang hapis na may atitud ng paghahanog ng sarili ay naniniwala na hindi maaaring suminag ang katotohanan at kahulugan kung hindi muna dumaraan sa hapis at kawalan, sapagka’t sa hapis “malilikha muli ng tao ang kanyang sarili.” Sa ganitong paraan, yinayakap ng kanyang buong katauhan ang katotohanan ng hapis at kawalan, panatag sa kaalaman na may gumagalaw na kahulugan sa likod nito— hindi lang basta isang absurdong kilos ng meron.

Dahil dito, kumikilos pa rin ang isang uri ng kalayaan na magpasya at lumampas. Gumagalaw ngayon ang tao sa loob ng dalawang magkabilang dulo ng kahirapan at katiwasayan, ng pagtatago at paghahanap bilang mismong istruktura ng meron. Sa madaling salita, kinikilala ng atitud na ito na hindi maaaring umiral ang tao sa kaligayahan kung wala itong kalakip na hapis at kahirapan.

Sa pagtingin sa hapis bilang pagdadalisay at pagkakataon na ihandog ang sarili, nagsisilbing mismong paraan ng paglampas ito tungo sa isang mas mataas na katotohanan, isang paglundag ula sa isang mababang nibel ng meron patungo sa isang mas mataas na nibel. Upang makalampas, ngayon, kinakailangang harapin ng tao ang mismong hapis ng buong sangkameronan at tingnan ito bilang isang makahulugang karanasan: ang tanging daan ng kaligtasan at kapatawaran, patungo sa kanyang kapwa at sa Absolutong Ikaw.

Sa ganitong paraan, makikita nga na habang nakalugmok sa hapis ang taong nagtatago, gumagalaw pa rin ang kanyang diwa sa loob ng pag-asa. Kinikilala niay ang presensya ng kanyang kapwa-tao na siyang naghahanap sa kanya, at ang Absolutong Ikaw na tumatawag sa kanya. Sa wakas, nag-aanyong isang katwang biyaya ang mismong hapis, sapagka’t binubuhay nito ang potensyal para matagpuan, mahango mula sa lamig ng kadiliman, at sa wakas, mailigtas.

ANG PILOSOPIYA BILANG LARO NG PAGHAHADOG AT GALAK

Ngayong kinikilala natin ang ating mga sarili bilang isang nakakagat sa mismong meron, at umiiral sa isang komunidad ng mga umiiral, kinakailangan ngayon ng tao na isabuhay ang kanyang tungkulin bilang tagapaggitna. Sa pagkilala at pag-angkin rin sa nakasangkap na hapis sa buong sangkameronan, higit na napapatingkad ang pagsasagitna na ito bilang isang kilos ng paghahandog ng sarili.

Sa pagtanaw naman ng Pilosopiya sa hapis ng sangkameronan bilang landas ng paglampas at kaligtasan, sa pagkilala sa katotohanan ng pagdurusa ng kapwa, tinatawag nito ngayon ang tao na pumagitna sa hapis na ito, at maging mismong handog para sa kanyang kapwang katulad din niyang naghahapis. Gaya nga ng nasabi ni Manny Dy, “Ang pag-aalay ng aking sarili ay ang pag-aalay ng aking loob, kaisipan, damdamin, at mga karanasan sa kapwa— sa madaling salita, ang buong buhay ko. Isang pagbabahagi ng sarili ko sa kapwa ang pagmamahal.” Dito natin sa wakas nauunawaan ang paghahandog na ito bilang mismong kadalisayan ng pagmamahal, na kung saan tunay ngang lumalampas ang tao mula sa kanyang sarili patungo sa kanyang kapwa, mula sa pagkakulob ng sarili patungo sa isang mas matayog at malwalhating pagkaka-isa at pagpapahalaga.

Nasa atin ngayon na tugunan ang tawag ng paghahanap at paghahandog na ito sa ating pakikipagsapalaran sa mundo. Tulad tayo ng mga batang naglalaro ng taguan, isang mahiwagang laro ng pagtatago at paghahanap. Sa paglalarong ito tumutubo ang isang galak ng pagtuklas at paghahandog ng pagmamahal na siyang nasa puso ng karanasan at gawa ng Pilosopiya.

“Boom-TAO-save!” sabay takbo, pabalik sa base. At uulit na naman ang laro ng taguan.

Why love, if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore,

only the life I’ve lived. Twice in that life I’ve been given

the choice, as a boy and as a man.

The boy chose safety. The man chooses suffering.

The pain, now, is part of the happiness, then. That’s the deal.

from A Death Observed, by C.S. Lewis

Perhaps in our hour of brokenness of body or anguish of spirit,

we have even touched the wood of his cross,

and known something of the presence of that love
which hangs there, which is the love of God Hiself—

greater than the sum of our fears and the evil in the world.

from And They Shall Name Him Emmanuel
by Fr. Catalino G. Arévalo

Promises Kept

2006-02-07T00:12:00.000+08:00

A decade almost had passed between us, and I thought about him rarely; that is to say, I did not think about him at all, except perhaps, as a footnote to simpler days, when everything seemed possible. He was, of course, that priest who sat in that room all morning, hearing the confessions of hormonal boys, whose sins, perhaps, were as humorous as they were honest. We would visit him once and a while, on Monday afternoons, when it did not rain, to hear some spiritual direction, unsure of whether it was we who needed guidance, or he who needed the company. In some deep dark corner of our misguided minds, we thought that it was our act of charity: old men needed only to feel useful.

I sat there embarrassed at our ingratitude, but I knew that he forgave us, because it was something that I knew he did so well. He was the priest of my confessional, and I visit him now to make this confession. I am sure he is glad that, at least, I returned.

* * *

I sat in silence in that empty church, reflecting at the simplicity of his final leaving. There were no distinctions which marked his passing; no banners heralded his life. No bright lights surrounded him, to keep watch on these dark mornings. No flowers adorned his bier. There was only that solitary candle whose flame was lit on that Easter Eve, when our faith affirms that we do not die.

Of course, there were no metaphysical medals of those patient mornings, nothing to remind him of the souls he helped unburden, of the confused lives he tried to mend. I wondered what, in death, he held and owned closest to his heart, as a legacy of his living and a memory to his passing.

My mind wandered to that fine day in May (surely, he too must have done it), when he knelt before the bread which was the Body of Christ, and pronounced the vows of his life-long vocation.

Almighty and eternal God, I, though altogether most unworthy in your divine sight, yet relying on Your infinite goodness and mercy and moved with a desire of serving You, in the presence of the most holy Virgin Mary and your whole heavenly court, vow to your Divine Majesty perpetual poverty, chastity, and obedience in the Society of Jesus; and I promise that I shall enter the same Society in order to lead my entire life in it, understanding all things according to its Constitutions. Therefore, I suppliantly beg Your immense Goodness and Clemency, through the blood of Jesus Christ, to deign to receive this holocaust in an odor of sweetness; and that just as You gave me the grace to desire and offer this, so You will also bestow abundant grace to fulfill it.

Following this profession, he arose and received a crucifix which under the Constitutions of his Order is the only thing on earth he was allowed to own. And from that day forward, he owned nothing, nothing at all, and nothing else. Would it have been enough?

His life supplied the answer.

He clutched that crucifix on that fine May day, like his brothers before him, since time immemorial and forever more. And I remembered what they used to say about the dead, of how they go to their graves clutched in their hands only the things that they have given away.

He lived with nothing, but he died with everything. His is still the only life that makes sense.

[Photographs by Bro. Jeff Pioquinto, S.J.]

Intersections

2006-02-04T12:56:00.000+08:00

Sometimes, people come in and out of our lives without our consciously realizing it. Perhaps it was because we were merely neighbors, or classmates, or coursemates, or colleagues, or friends of the family, or maybe even, friends of friends. Brought together by mere circumstance, chance meetings, or quirks of fate, we found ourselves traveling the same road for the meantime, spending days, or months, or even semesters together. Yet with the turning of the season, we had to move on.

Some of them we kept in touch with, others just seemed to have disappeared, or perhaps, even drifted away. We would still see them, of course, passing corridors, drowsing on benches, drinking at parties. But our roads were mapped for different destinations; our hearts programmed for different vocations. And so, the traveled path worn smooth by our common striving broke-up in branches, turned the corner, and went its own way.

We had our season. Allgoodthingsmustcometoanend.

Sometimes, though, if we are lucky, those divergent roads turn the bend again to find them intersecting, in an entirely unexpected and delightfully comforting way. As it was when it started— by mere circumstance, chance meeting, or quirk of fate— we face one another again, after years or moments, somewhat older, chipped on the edges, yet glad to meet a familiar face.

We come together on lazy Saturday afternoons, or surreptitious YM conversations, bringing reports of our struggles with the world. We catch-up, politely at first, but later on, resurrecting memories of those days, or months, or even semesters shared together. We may even get a glimpse of who we used to be, during that portion of the shared journey.

We realize many things, but of these many, I suspect that upon this intersection, we find that we have changed very little, essentially, from who we were when we were still ourselves. Strangely, mysteriously, we find that we are exactly the same people we used to know, intact, only slightly weathered and slightly worn.

And we realize, also, only because we had forgotten: that in those idle moments between days, or months, or even semesters shared together, we had, in the meantime, unconsciously, effortlessly, become good friends.

We just needed to be reminded.

* * *

The following letter was something I wrote to a former English blockmate and coursemate in Management Engineering. We had lost touch after our sophomore year, she having chosen to shift courses, and later on, entering into a relationship, and I, shifting into Philosophy a semester after.

After getting to talk to her again after such a long time, she reminded me of this letter, and how she had treasured it as the years had passed. I wrote it in response to an email she had sent us following her decision to shift out of Management Engineering. She scanned and sent it to me, almost eight years after I had written it.

It was interesting reading the letter, because I no longer had any recollection of having written it. But reading through it, seeing my old letterhead, my old cellphone and pager numbers, and my expired sky-i-net address, it was a pleasant rush of memory. It even amazed me how well I used to write then, without reservation, cynicism or jadedness.

Strangely, though, I think that I still would have told her the same things now, in a different tone, perhaps, or a different expression. But the same things nonetheless. It comforted me to know that somehow, some things will never change.

* * *

Thank you for the reminder, J.

And K, I hope that this has answered your question.

The Star

2006-01-28T00:48:00.000+08:00

Well, I think that’s a super philosophy, Sean.
I mean, that way, you could actually go through
the rest of your life without ever really knowing anybody.

From the movie, Good Will Hunting

This piece was written in second year college, as part of the course requirements of my Psychology 11 class. It’s good, I think, to once and a while be reminded how easy it was to wear our hearts on our sleeves. The names in this piece, of course, have been changed from the original.

Celine sits at the back of our classroom in psychology. I had not noticed her in the first few days of school, and it took a classmate of mine from high school to point her out to me. That was when she captured my imagination.

She’s really nothing magnificent, nothing quite like Claudia Shiffer or Cindy Crawford. But it is precisely this simplicity, this gentleness, this lack of flare and clutter that attracts me so much to her. So nice to look at, Celine, with her pony-tail, and her bangs parted at the middle of that strands of her hair fall ever so delicately on both sides of her face; a face that is at the same time quiet and eloquent, mysterious and simple, like a rose, or a star.

I could just spend the whole period looking at her, admiring her from a distance, tracing her face unto my mind. But unfortunately, she sits behind me; I have to make a reason to look back, steal a glance, and be satisfied with bits and pieces of her, mental snapshots of this rose, or this star.

That was why I was not surprised to learn that she already had a boyfriend, a classmate in Filipino as it turned out; God does have a sense of humor. I was not surprised, yes, but disheartened, very much: saddened to know that yet another of the girls that held the magic to my imagination was, like the star I perceived her to be, far and unreachable.

The story of my life, I told myself. And yet, even if I did have a chance, I still would not have gone for her. With distance, there is no hurt. With distance, there is no pain. With distance, there is no embarrassment or regret. It is a fear that I have always had, a fear that has kept me from risking, from opening up, from loving.

Not that I choose not to, but because habit hinders me. Perhaps it is trauma, as my friends tell me. It is indeed something illogical, even non-sensical, something which is borne by a fear of being rejected, of being passed over for not being good enough.

e.e. cummings has the most perfect poem for this reality:

somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Love, cummings writes, has the power to open and close a person. It has the power to make or break a soul. This is probably why I am so cynical about it. This is probably why I am so cautious about it. This is probably why the movie Good Will Hunting hit very close to home: “He pushes people away before they have the chance to leave him. It’s a defense mechanism, all right?”

I’ve known this about myself for quite some time now, and it is a reality which I can’t really help. Fear sometimes is more powerful than attraction, or even emotion. Mas madaling mang-iwan kaysa sa iwanan. Kaya’t kung alam mong iiwanan ka, unahan mo na. Mabuti nang ikaw na ang mang-iwan kaysa sa iwanan.

And I guess it would be a case of life imitating art when some people say that Good Will Hunting is my movie, because, in some ways, it is. Not that I am any mathematical genius, but that I too am pushed against people’s expectations, conditioned to believe that failure is not an option, and that life is somehow a “Field’s Medal.” I understand, however, the logic behind such a philosophy, because talents indeed have to be utilized, and maximized, and honed, in order for them to be shared. But then again, it’s all just a matter of perspective. After all, happiness is often just a question of degrees.

This, I have realized, and this issue of being “pushed” is not much of a concern for me now. Life is too short for such “matters of consequence,” as Saint-Exupery writes. In the end, it is really a search for happiness that matters; that in helping others, we become happy, no matter what we may be: astrophysicists or brick-layers: to feel the beautiful emptied feeling of a toothpaste tube— all squeezed out, twisted whichever way, folded many times over, but scraped clean of all the beautiful gifts God has given to be given away.

But then, the problem is that something continues to be missing. Even after this giving, something continues to be absent. Perhaps I still lack the courage to write, “I had to go see about a girl,” whatever that “girl” may turn out to be: a dream, a person, a God. Because the reality of the matter is, I am afraid to risk and make myself vulnerable. I like to play it safe. This is why Robin William’s little monologue at Boston Common with Matt Damon was a hard knock on my head, a searing indictment against this unexplainable and inescapable fear:

I'd ask you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. . . . known someone that could level you with her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. . . . who could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn't know what it's like to be her angel, to have that love for her, be there forever. Through anything. Through cancer. And you wouldn't know about sleepin’ sittin’ up in the hospital room for two months, holding her hand, because the doctors could see in your eyes that the terms “visiting hours” don't apply to you.

You don't know about real loss, 'cause it only occurs when you've loved something more than you love yourself. And I doubt you've ever dared to love anybody that much. And look at you... I don't see an intelligent, confident man... I see a cocky, scared shitless kid.

I am a cocky, scared shitless kid, hiding behind my books, and my masks, and my walls, because there, there isn’t any risk. They isn’t any vulnerability. There isn’t any potential for disappointment, or even for pain. And yet still, I long for company, for tenderness, for love. It is indeed something very confusing, running away from the very thing I need, the very thing that will heal me from this affliction.

This is why in moments like these, through movies like these, I remember Celine, and people like Celine who hold the key to my loneliness, and my happiness. And I am envious.

At sa gitna ng pagka-inggit na ‘yon ang nakapangibabaw na damdamin ng pag-iisa. Malungkot, hindi ba? Sa katapusan ng isa na namang araw, madalas na bumabalik sa akin ang katotohanang, The greatest human need is to be needed. At bagama’t ako’y nangangailangan, ay wala naman ang sa akin ang nangangailangan. Sometimes, at the end of the day, as I sit alone in my idling car, the overwhelming feeling of emptiness embraces me so tightly that it almost drives me to tears. Malungkot lang mga-isa. Sinasabi nga nila, we live lives of quiet desperation.

At kahit na ilang oras pa man ako umupo sa loob ng kapilya at tahamik na magdasal sa Kanyang nangakong papawi sa lahat ng pag-iisa, hinding-hindi mawawala sa akin ang pangangailangan para sa hawak ng iba. God does not come down from the wooden cross to hug you. People do that. Kaya’t tuwing nakikita ko si Celine, at si Mico tuwing magkasama sila, o si Enzo at si Hannah, o si Carlo at si Issa, o si Raymund at si Karla, o sino pang magakaibigan o magka-ibigan, hindi mawawala sa akin ang pagnanasa para sa iba, para sa kanya, kung sino o kung ano man siya.

We are all broken people. Lahat tayo’y nangangailangan ng pansin, kalinga, yakap, reassurance, security, love. At sa ilalim ng aking maskarang akademico, at pagpapanggap-sigurado, ay isang takot at basag na taong hindi nakasisiguro na mamahalin nga siya ng mundo. Ngunit ‘yan ako: basag at insecure na ito, sinusubukan maging maligaya kahit nag-iisa.

Ang cute ni Celine. Sobra.

Second Glances (Reprise)

2006-01-25T22:32:00.000+08:00

He olvidado tu rostro, no recuerdo tus manos,
cómo besan tus labios?
Por ti amo las blancas estatuas que no tienen voz ni mirada.
He olvidado tu voz, tu voz alegre, he olvidado tus ojos.

de Un Amor por Pablo Neruda

She knew that she was finally over him. Although it was a struggle getting on with life following their sudden separation, she surprised even herself when one morning, not long after, she awoke and realized that she no longer remembered what he looked like, no longer heard his voice in her head, no longer saw him in her dreams.

Perhaps it was true, she thought, that people don't really get over someone, as though it were some task consciously to be worked at: it simply happened, without premeditation or desire, and all that one could really do in the meantime was wait for its coming.

That was why she wondered how, even after so long, she still found herself taking second glances at old, familiar corners they used to visit, at coffeeshops, restaurants, park benches, wondering if the man seated with his back to her was him, her heart racing at the faintest resemblance of hair, or voice, or gait, fighting the impulse to call out his name, afraid that if she did, the man would look back.

It was a mere trick of the mind, she thought. A mere glitch of the heart.

She understood then what it was that the poet meant when he wrote: he olvidado tu amor y sin embargo, te adivino detrás de todas las ventanas. We forget loves, indeed, yet still, we seem to glimpse them behind every window. This frightened her, because at that moment of sober recognition, she realized that the more she tried to forget him, the more she found herself remembering. And that, hopelessly, she found that she could not forget. . . .

* * *

It was bound to happen at some point or another, she thought, as she got out of the car, in front of the restaurant where they were all supposed to meet. The invitations were sent out almost a week ago, personally and over the internet, and while she had debated long and hard on whether to attend or not, she thought that she would be giving in to her weakness if she chose not to come. How bad could it be, she reasoned. So he was going to be there. . . . So she was going to see him. . . . So they haven't seen each other in six months. . . . She knew she had to face her ghosts.

She walked briskly across the parking lot, half-lit from the neon of the restaurants above. Her heart started to beat faster in anticipation, coming up the steps at last, getting into the elevator. She pressed “5” and the door whizzed shut. The elevator lurched upward, and alone, she looked at her reflection on the dull aluminum, stained with fingerprints and grease, feeling half stupid and half dreamy at the absurdity of the evening. Or perhaps, she thought, it was all just in her head.

She walked into the restaurant, and searched the sea of faces for her friends— his friends also, by time and affinity— but tonight, they were hers. It had been a while since they had all last seen one another, and while some had suggested not to invite him to the dinner altogether, they knew that he had as much right to be there as she did; friends though they were, they did not want to take sides. Not that it really mattered to her whose side they were on, because she knew that it was only her side that mattered, and his, and nobody else’s. This was her issue, not theirs. Not even his, she thought. He was gone for too long to make the issue remotely his own.

She found them seated by the terrazza. A spontaneous burst of welcome greeted her, because she was the last to arrive. In the adrenalin of the moment, she hardly noticed him smile at her, sitting at the corner of the table. She smiled back, absent-mindedly, pretending distraction, feigning civility. Thank God, she thought, she wasn’t the type to give friends buzzes on the cheek. She finally sat herself down, three seats away from him, and got straight into the thick of the conversation, trying hard not to think of the fact that he existed, again, all flesh and blood and heart of him, merely three seats away.

The drinks and the food flowed freely through the evening, as it always would in the company of friends. She was amazed at how everyone else was carrying on with the festivities, without ever a hint of awkwardness or tension. It was perhaps an art that they had perfected as unwitting spectators in the sometimes sordid drama that was their life. She, of course, did not speak to him directly, and neither did he, to her. But it was not an awkward sort of obliviousness; it was neither angry nor bitter. It was, in fact, a respectful unawareness— maybe even a reverential attempt at forgetting— certainly, one borne of an acknowledgement of a finished past, or a tired present.

Even then, as he launched into his usual routine of jokes and commentary, she knew that she could not get mad at him for his leaving, even after the silence and the half-uttered explanations; even when he appeared so normal and unaffected, so getting-on with his life. She had so many questions, yes, but tonight, she did not know exactly what to ask or where to begin, or whether she wanted to ask them at all; only she knew what she felt. The feeling descended upon her like a heavy blanket, and she knew that it was resigned regret, dull yet overwhelming.

Now and then, between lulls and silences, through the ubiquitous beat of the bass and the music, she would notice his laughter, and she knew that he was still the same old person, thankfully, and unfortunately.

At last, they called for the bill, and the waiter came to make an accounting. When they got up from the table, it was nearly midnight, and they all parted ways at the restaurant’s entrance, with the usual hugs and handshakes. But he took his leave, by going away first, trying perhaps to save everyone from the awkwardness of separation.

And just like that, he was gone again, without so much as an acknowledgement of her existence. Of course, she noticed the haste at which he took his leave, but she chose not to be affected. She did not follow him to the elevator with her eyes. She did not fall silent or heave a sigh of regret or even of relief at his leaving. No. And while there suddenly surged an impulse to run after him, tug on his sleeve one last time, ask him whether everything was alright, she resisted, bent on putting up a face of frankness and resolve. She did not want anyone to know that he still mattered, if only in her memory.

Walking finally back to her car, alone again after a long day of work and worry, she felt the cold nip of wind blowing, colder, it seemed, than she had ever felt before. Alone with herself on that burdened walk of solitude and independence, she allowed some moments of vulnerability, and decided, quite consciously, that she loved him still, somehow, in those unvisited places of her heart. She loved him directly, without complexities or pride, without wanting to do anything more, without wanting to start the cycle again.

She reached her car at last, and fished for the keys from her purse. She was about to turn the lock, when someone called out her name. She knew who it was, of course, the inflection of his voice giving him away, and when she turned around, he was already standing two feet in front of her.

“Hey,” she said awkwardly, trying not to look at him.

He fumbled for words, trying to be natural. She tried to look impatient, formal, detached. “What’s up?” she asked, looking up at him, finally.

“Um. . . . just wanted to say good-bye, actually,” he answered. “It was too weird in there.”

She gave out a disgusted groan. “Yeah, well,” she said, looking away.

“I wish we could talk sometime soon,” he said, gravely, cutting her off in mid-sentence.

“If you want to,” she said with a shrug, letting the proposal hang stale in the air, a hint of disappointment in her expression.

“Well, that’s all, really,” he said finally, half-hoping that she would say something more.

But all she said was, “Alright.”

“Anyway, it was nice seeing you,” he said, embarrassed.

“You too,” she answered, and from her tone, it was difficult to tell whether she was serious or she was sarcastic.

He took some steps back, turned around, and walked away.

She got into her car without seeing where he was going. She fastened her seatbelt, and started the engine, turned on the air-conditioner, then set the radio. She eased out of the parking slot, and headed towards the exit. Gripping the steering wheel tight, she finally noticed his car, so familiar by now, waiting some distance from the road, its engine running, its taillights red, but still unmoving. She passed it without stopping, surrendered her parking ticket, exited the carpark, onto the road and into the traffic. For a moment, she took a glance back at her rear-view mirror to see if he was still there, parked, and he was. She turned up the volume of her radio, and at that instant, realized that she felt absolutely nothing at all.

Andiamo Mangiare L'alimento Italiano

2006-01-14T13:01:00.000+08:00

I think it was because I could not swallow without water that my yaya fed me my first taste of spaghetti. I was two or three years old then, rather thin and sickly, and very difficult to feed. This was because I had fallen into the habit of following every spoonful with a gulp of water, too lazy, perhaps, of chewing on my food; too scared, indeed, to choke on any bones. Not only did it take me hours to finish my meal, I would also be full without having gotten any nutrition— the water would have satiated my little, finicky stomach.

And so, my yaya, wanting to plump me up on my father's orders, stumbled upon the idea of finally feeding me spaghetti, with its noodles not too difficult to chew or swallow. And with enough nutrition to jump-start my waning metabolism, it seemed to work. Thus, everyday day during my early childhood, I would get my diet of noodles and home made children's sauce of the sticky kind, with hotdogs, ketchup and even sugar, I believe.

Later on, and growing older, it was my mom— who herself enjoys a good Al Tinta and lots of parmagian cheese— who introduced me to the true Italian palette, bringing home pizza from work, or taking me out to eat at Italian restaurants. By the time I was a teen-ager, I was a certified spaghetti and pizza addict, never turning down an opportunity to sample the newest Italian restaurant or trattoria.

So comfortable was I to the taste of Italia that if I did not want the food served at home for a particular meal, I'd have it replaced by some trusty pasta, always on supply in our freezer. Anyone who's gone to my house will attest that there is always spaghetti— at times, even two types, Bolognese and Putanesca— ready to be served at a moment's notice. Whether breakfast, lunch, or dinner, the default food was spaghetti; or if any had been delivered, pizza from Shakey's or Pizza Hut, or Magoo's. In law school, spaghetti had even become my de facto comfort food. For the most of my four years there, spaghetti was regular fare at midnight, right before bedtime— this, of course, explains why one day, somewhat late in my study of law, I realized that I had suddenly grown a tummy! But the noodles, with the slight salty-sweetness of the sauce felt just right at the end of the day; it was difficult to resist such a simple joy.

Having gone to so many Italian restaurants, therefore, I have been able to form a good opinion of which among the many are actually worth visiting again and again. In reality, my tastes in Italian cuisine are rather really unsophisticated, and my choice of pasta somewhat even limited: I do not eat pesto, tinta or cream sauce. I do not like too much meat on my pasta, and I normally prefer spaghetti noodles over fetucinni, but sometimes, if I feel whimsical, I ask for fusilli, or angelhair, depending on the sauce. And always, always, I like my noodles aldente: there isn't anything like wet and soggy noodles to ruin a perfectly good sauce.

And so now, let me share with you my own discoveries— where the pizza is fresh and the pasta, delicious. These are the places where I enjoy my Italian food the most.

Therefore, dear friends, I now present: Peej's TopTen Pizza and Pasta Picks.

1. Burgho Pizza

We had just arrived at the Termini Station in Rome, after a Jesuit friend of our picked us up and brought us to the hotel. Immediately after checking in, he brought us around the major churches of that Eternal City. Of course, the last stop was St. Peter's. The Piazza di San Pietro was grand and imposing; but we had not had anything to eat for the whole day. Sensing our unease, the good Jesuit brought us to this small pizzeria off Bernini's Colonnade, out the Porta di Santa Anna, to this small place called Burgho Pizza.

My Jesuit friend ordered some slices of pizza— which, I had just then observed, they served by the weight and in little square pieces— and after only a couple of seconds, the first order had already been consumed. Perhaps it was because I was really hungry, or that it was my first taste of true Italian pizza, but that pizza was, by far, the best pizza I've tasted in my life. To think that it was only margarita and ham that we ate that morning!

2. Amici di Don Bosco

I had first heard about this restaurant sometime during the beginning of last year, from Fr. Catalino Arévalo, no less. But because law school was a more pressing concern, I did not have the time to travel all the way to Don Bosco, near Pasay Road, to find out what all the hoopla was about.

I was not to be disappointed. It was only during my cousin's birthday last November that I finally had the chance to go to Amici. Since then, I have become a regular customer (especially now that my office is just, at most, a ten minutes' walk away!). On hungry evenings, I'd finish a whole Pizza Al Funghi, which costs a mere P240! I'd normally also order their Spaghetti di Don Bosco, or their Spaghetti Mafioso. They say, however, that the Lasagna is worth every bite, but only if they are any left after the baking; they sell quite quickly.

And this wouldn't be complete without mentioning the gelato which they sell at only P35. There are over ten flavors to choose from; I normally ask for Pistachio or Strawberry Marble.

Antonio Arnaiz ave. corner Chino Roces ave., Makati City.
Restaurant hours are from 11 am to 9 pm, Monday to Saturday

3. Bellinni's

Belinni's used to occupy my favorite Italian restaurant before I began eating at Amici. Before Amici, it was the closest I could get to real Italian cuisine, and the prices were quite affordable. I think the atmosphere of the place also adds to the home-style character of the experience. It is a good place to have intimate conversation over tasty Italian pasta and pizza; and while the service is not that good, the freshly baked bread sticks, the tangy taste of the balsamic vinegar, and the complimentary after-meal ice-wine far make-up for any deficiencies. I even remember one or two times when I would invite some law school friends to a sudden lunch there, and we would take the MRT all the way from Rockwell to the Marikina Shoe Expo in Cubao. I also remember having many memorable and comfortable dinners there, with people still present or now inadvertently absent.

Ever the creature of habit, I normally only order the Scampi Pasta (in spaghetti noodles, of course), and the Frutti di Mare pizza. They say that the Pasta Cartoccio is also good, but I haven't had the courage to stray from my regular menu. The prices, in general, are higher than those of Amici, but I think the ambience and privacy make the additional cost almost negligible. If you want an affordable, quiet Italian dinner, this is the place.

Marikina Shoe Expo Cubao, Quezon City
Open daily from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.

4. AmoRoma

I first ate here during one of those lunches which a law partner tendered for me after my interview in their firm. The prices were rather steep, because it was fine dining right down to the tableware, and I was glad that I was not footing the bill. I don't really recall what I had that day— perhaps I was too nervous to appreciate what I had ordered. It was not until last November, when I was invited to have dinner there by a law school buddy and her good friend that I finally became aware of the menu. We had ordered wine, Salissia Pizza, and Ragù in Ravioli Spinaci. The meal was pretty satistying, and I could tell, they were gourmet powers involved.

Ground floor, Valuepoint Executive Apartments.
227 Salcedo Street, Legaspi Village, 1229 Makati City.

5. Bravo's

Bravo's is a perfect place to eat after shopping in ATC or at the Festival Mall, in Alabang. I know that there's another branch somewhere in Malate, but we never had the chance to seek it out. The ambience is pretty good too; it's a nice place to have a quiet dinner in. Their Spaghetti Pomodoro is pretty tasty, but the pizzas, I think, are their specialty. The crusts are freshly made; expect flour to cover your hands when you pick the slices up from the tray— indeed, the best way to eat pizza! They say that their tomato dip is also pretty good, and you can order it out in bottles, to be enjoyed at home with freshly toasted panini.

Bravo's was our favorite Italian restaurant. Good memories.

Festival Supermall, 2nd Level
Corporate Ave. cor. Civic Drive
Filinvest Corporate City, Alabang, Muntinlupa City

6. The Old Spaghetti House

I first discovered TOSH while taking one of my long drives at the Ateneo, in Loyola. Where Full House used to be, there was this new pasta place that seemed to spring up from nowhere. At first, I was somewhat disappointed, because I really liked Full House's cheap and delicious food, especially their chicken crepe. But because it was a new pasta place, I resolved to try it out. And so on my next visit to the Ateneo, I had merienda at TOSH.

The place was pretty cozy and well-apportioned, I thought, but what surprised me more was that the prices were not that steep. While it certainly was not fine dining, I felt that it was a good place for students to have lunch/dinner/merienda following classes at the Ateneo. And the food was tasty enough: I normally have the Spaghetti Pizzaiola, and an order of Margherita Pizza. The preparation is somewhat commercial, but for merienda or a filling dinner, TOSH is always a good alternative.

319 A. Katipunan Avenue, Loyola Heights, Q.C. 1108
http://www.theoldspaghettihouse.com/

7. Cibo

Of course, who hasn't heard of Cibo? The first time I ate there, I thought it was one of those restaurants where you go because you wanted to be seen (I remember, it was still in Glorietta, in the middle of a busy corridor-- they did not yet have their own space; they just cordoned-off the corridor). Certainly the place had that nouveau cuisine, uppity-up feel to it. But the food, as I'm sure you will agree, is worth the added pretense.

When there, I usually have the Spaghetti La Foresta or Spaghetti Pescatore, depending on the mood of the day. But I also always order the Spinach dip and iced tea. If I'm extra hungry, I get their Pumpkin Soup. Delicious and filling, Cibo is best for me when I want to have a quiet meal with myself.

Power Plant Mall, 1st Level,
Rockwell Drive cor. Estrella St.
Makati City

8. A Venetto Pizzeria Ristorante

I first ate at A Venetto in fourth year college. I came with a big crown then, and I was just somewhat tagging along, focused on another agenda then at hand. But what caught my attention were the long lines that queued-up for a table that evening. It was a scene that I would witness, even up to now, whenever I go out and have dinner at A Venetto.

It was a New-York style Italian restaurant, with thick crusts and big servings. When I learned that their original branch was along Visayas Avenue, I wasted no time in trying out their menu. My favorite is the Eggplant Parmigiana or the Chicken Parmigiana, which they serve over spaghetti noodles. Because the servings are big, spaghetti and a small pizza will be enough to feed two people, with some left-overs still to take home. And precisely because it is dining, family style, it is a perfect place for barkada foodtrips, where you can get loud, rowdy, and very, very full.

26 Visayas Ave., Project 6, Quezon City
Open from 11am to 11pm, Monday to Saturday;
open from 5pm to 11pm, Sunday

9. Caffein/Cost U Less

Tin Reyes had invited me to Caffein a week after I took the Bar. It had become a popular wateringhole for the group because the beer was cheap, the place was out of the way, and they were practically the only people who would be there.

They would normally order chips and fries, because Caffein was a place you'd go to for drinks, but because I was particularly hungry that evening, I opted for some dinner of Seafood Pasta. I wasn't expecting much, knowing that the place was just another hole-in-the-wall, but the spaghetti proved to be a pleasant surprise!

Afterwards, they suggested that we get some after-drinks pizzas at Cost-U-Less (Caffein closes quite early), along Libis, near the fly-over. Following the herd, we ordered slices of Combination and Peperroni pizzas which turned out to be the perfect after-gimmik food. The best thing about it was that Cost-U-Less was open 24-hours a day! And so, from then on, whenever I'd be driving home from a party or some gathering, I would almost always pass by for pizza at Cost-U-Less, and have a midnight snack before retiring for the day.

10. Magoo's Pizza

I don't know why I found myself regularly ordering Magoo's Pizza on Friday nights, when I craved for something Italian. Maybe it was because I had grown tired of the taste of Shakey's Manager's Choice, thin crust, or because Pizza Hut's pizzas were just too greasy or that Yellow Cab's manu was just too expensive. I think it was it was also because Magoo's Pizzas taste unique from all the others, with their heavy garlic and cheese flavor. And the fact that they were cut into little square pieces added to the novelty of the experience. For a quick pizza fix at home, therefore, Magoo's Pizza is the way to go.

http://www.magoos.com/

And so, here's to all of us pizza and pasta lovers out there! If anyone has any new gastronomic discoveries, do let me know. Perhaps we can even meet up for a meal there. My treat!

Ciao e a presto!

Sa Kaharian ng Araw

2006-01-06T23:04:00.001+08:00

Written in lyrical and captivating Filipino, Sa Kaharian ng Araw has a simple plot: the search by two friends, Ponce and Paolo, for the legendary Kaharian ng Araw. The two go for different reasons: Ponce is driven by the wealth, power and fame this kingdom promises, while Paolo goes because of his friend.

Their long journey takes them through three kingdoms— Kaharian ng Ulan, Kaharian ng Hangin and Kaharian ng Dilim, each of which cannot be passed unless a heartbreaking toll is paid to its king. In the end, Ponce, broken and alone, reaches the Kaharian ng Araw, the end of the journey for which he has traded everything he holds dear— only to be met by a surprising, spine-tingling revelation. . . .

from Ateneo's classic play about the rat race staged anew
by Paulo K. Tirol, Philippine Daily Inquirer, February 1999.

The minutes seemed to trickle by, a slow stream down that magic mountain, waiting as the day drew to a close. It was Friday, the end of another day, the conclusion of another week, the first of the rest of my life. The office was nearly empty now, the telephones falling dead, the associates and partners going off to their weekend retreats, evening entertainments, golf games, familial obligations. I sat there at my desk defeated, staring into the darkening screen of my monitor just recently turned off, not knowing whether it was loneliness or disappointment that I felt, or whether I knew exactly what I was doing. I blinked my eyes from the strain, stretched my back, looked around, beyond my little corner space, beyond the secretaries' station, beyond the cubicles of my colleagues, and in the harsh glow of the fluorescents realized that in this place of acerbic silences, there were no windows, only walls.

It was a difficult week, especially for me, nursing a holiday cough grown worse. The work was manageable, of course, and somewhat even routinary, but slowly, the deadlines were piling up. It was the cost of being the freshman in a team of veteran lawyers, I thought, and while I was gladly putting in the hours— content as I was doing what I thought I would someday enjoy— the stark luminosity of the moment left me panting and cold: this office was my Clean, Well-Lighted Place, and everything now seemed to be nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada.

'Di ka ba nangangambang magising isang umaga at matuklasang ika'y mali pala— na lahat ng tinapon mo't inaksaya ang siya palang tunay na mahalaga?

It was a human moment, I thought, of doubting and opportunity costs. The rollercoaster ride of emotions (as a friend described it) was certainly something quite expected from a fresh graduate like me, where images of the rest of one's life begins to flash with alarming regularity during unguarded moments between memoranda and legal opinions. Somehow I was comforted by the fact that it was probably just cold feet, and as Hemingway quite poignantly wrote, many, indeed, must have it.

* * *

PANGWAKAS

Buhat sa nakapinid na tabing, lalabas nang mabagal ang Hari ng Araw, nakakapang ginto, nakakoronang ginto, ngunit mukhang hapong-hapo, mga mata'y namumugto. Mahihintakutan si Ponce sa alingawngaw ng musika, palakpakan at hiyawan. Mapapagapang pakaliwa. Malumanay na kumumpas ang Hari ng Araw sa di nakikitang madla. Marahang huhupa ang musika, palakpak, at hiyawan.

Hari ng Araw: [Sa tinig na pagod na pagod] Ah, kaibigan, kapatid sa pagkauhaw sa kaharian ng araw, kay tagal-tagal kitang inani-aninaw. Kapatid sa pagkahibang sa tagumpay, kay tagal-tagal kitang hinintay-hintay. Huwang kang matakot. Lumapit ka't paakbay sa isang katulad mo'y kay layo na rin ng nilakbay. Sa iyong pagdating, ako'y may alay. . . kapa't korona ko'y sa iyo ibibigay.

Ponce: Ibibigay? Bakit niyo po ibibigay?

Hari ng Araw: Pagka't ika'y nagtagumnpay. Natamo mo na ang kaharian mong pakay. Sa balikat mo na ngayon aking ilalagay ang kapang dati'y ako ang mga taglay.

Ponce: Hindi po yata bagay.

Hari ng Araw: Iyan ang atas ng tagumpay at ng buhay. Kahit sa bahay, iisa lang ang panganay. Di maaaring dalawang hari ang nakalukluk sa trono. Di ka idolo, kapag may kasalo. [Malungkot na tinig.] Mag-isa ka, kapag numero uno. Ikaw ang bagong panalo, kaya't heto, tanggapin ang premyo.

Ponce: Ngunit kayo nama'y paano?

Hari ng Araw: Galing na ako sa pinagdaanan mo, pati na sa iyong patutungo. Nahibang na nang totoo, nasugatan na nang husto. Pinagpalit nang lahat, pati mga minahal ko. Tulad mo. Ngayo'y pabayaan mo na lang akong makalaya rito.

Ponce: Ngunit ang kahariang hanap ko, nasaan ito?

Hari ng Araw: Nagsisimula rito. . . . ang kahariang ngayo'y sa 'yo. Kaya, bago pumasok sa kaharian mo, isuot mo na muna ang kapang ito. Ipatong mo muna, korona sa ulo. Tanggapin ang paghanga't palakpak ng tao.

Magpapalakpakan at maghihiyawan ang koro.

Ponce: Ngunit ang kahariang paghaharian ko, paanong mapapasok ito?

Hari ng Araw: Ipikit ang mga mata. Iwagayway ang korona't at kaharia'y lilitaw kapagdaka.

Hahakbang ang dating hari nang papaalis. Pipigilan ni Ponce.

Ponce: Huwag, huwag niyo akong iwanan.

Hari ng Araw: Nawa'y wala kang pagsisihan.

Ponce: Ngunit bakit, bakit? Pinaghirapang kaharia'y bakit ngayo'y tinatakasang pilit?

Hari ng Araw: Mga mata mo'y mulan nang ipikit nang katotohana'y iyo na ring masapit.

Sumandaling bantulot si Ponce sa kanyang gagawin. Sa wakas, ipipikit ang mga mata. Iwawagayway ang korona. Bubukas ang nakapinid na tabing sa dilim. Tunog ng isang bungkaka. Dahan-dahang mag-iilaw ang entablado. Isa pang bungkaka. Maraming bugkaka-- hungkag at basag ang tunog.

Matatambad, sa buong pag-iilaw, ang nagbabagang entablado. Walang anumang laman.

Ponce: Walang laman? Walang laman? Walang anupaman? [Sa dating hari] Ang Kaharian ng Araw ba'y walang laman?

Hari ng Araw: Walang laman. 'Yan ang mapait na katotohanan.

Ponce: Nasaan ang aking mga pinagimpan? Nasaan ang saya at kinang? Ang galak at pagdiriwang? Ang kasukdulang walang hanggang? Na sa pagkauhaw ko'y titighaw? Na sa pagnanasa ko'y aagaw? Na sa puso ko'y mag-uumapaw? Nasaan? Nasaan?

Hari ng Araw: Wala. Wala, kaibigan. Ang tunog ng tagumpay ay pakinggan: hungkag at basag, mapanglaw at bahaw. Tulad ng hiyaw na sa buho, umaalingawngaw.

Ponce: Ano? Pinagpalit ko ang kabayan at kasintahan, mga magulang at ang tahanan, pati ang aking pinakamatalik na kaibigan, para sa kahariang walang laman?

Hari ng Araw: 'Yan ang kabayaran sa ating kahangalan. Paalam, kaibigan.

Ponce: Huwag ninyo akong iwanan.

Hari ng Araw: Dapat akong maghanap ng sarili kong kapatawaran. . . kung ito pa'y matatagpuan.

Ponce: Ngunit ako'y mag-iisa.

Hari ng Araw: 'Yan ang sa ati'y pinakamabigat na parusa.

Tuluyang lalabas ang dating Hari ng Araw.

Ponce: [Mag-isa sa pagkalito at pagsisisi. Halos mapapahagulgol.] Saang langit ngayon hihingi ng habag, para sa hibang kong paglalagalag? Ako'y nagpabulag, nagpabulag, sa tagumpay na hungkag! Hungkag! Hungkag!

Mapapaluhod sa panghihina. Mapapahagulgol sa panghihinayang. Kasabay ng marahas na paglabnot sa kanyang gintong kapa, mapapahiyaw sa dagok ng pagkakaunawa sa hubad na katotohanan.

[Sisigaw] Aaaaaaahhhhhhhh!

* * *

The most oppressive time of the day is dusk, of course, as I leave the office and walk quietly to my car. The end of a long day, tiring and empty. The sunset sky darkens, the velvet rays reflecting luminous against the pane glass of the buildings. Melancholy never was so palpable, I thought, and the longing never so human.

Would only had I you to call at the end of my day.

I get into my car. Start the engine. Drive home.

Would only had I you.

Revolutions

2005-12-31T23:20:00.000+08:00

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to min'?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days of o' lang syne?

And days of auld lang syne, my dear,
And days of auld lang syne.
We'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet,
And days of auld lang syne?

Robert Burns

The world turns yet again. When the clock strikes midnight tonight, the earth (the scientists tell us) will be in the same position in its orbit as it was in years' past, coming, as it were, to the end of its year-long journey; returning, yet again, for the beginning of a new one. Tonight, at midnight, our planet, it seems, meets itself again, as though face to face upon a mirror: I wonder what it would see? The same planet, no doubt, but with a billion more people? A couple of new wars here and there? Many heroes, no doubt, yet many villains also? And certainly, certainly quite a number of lunatics.

Indeed, there is something poetic (and even philosophical) about this circular celestial dance that our planet completes at the end of every year, where endings are at once beginnings, as cycles close and cycles begin again— the never ending rhythm of existence, since time immemorial and forever more, at the end of an old year, and the beginning of a new one.

The symbolism is not lost to us— earthlings that we are— and on this night most especially, when we are called to remember, and to look ahead. No wonder, then, that this first month of the year is named after the Roman god Janus, sometimes portrayed as a door (the Latin for door is, in fact, ianua), sometimes portrayed with two faces, one looking forward and the other looking back.

* * *

Sitting down now to perform my own ritual of remembering, I find that the year passed rather quickly, if not uneventfully. Not that there were no worthwhile events to remember, but that I was probably too tired to revel in them, or perhaps too emotionally drained to feel them; no doubt, the Bar Examinations sapped the life out of me, as it did with many of us. Indeed, 2005 will always be remembered as the year I graduated from law school, and the year I took the Philippine Bar: the two overarching leitmotifs which played at the background of many of this year's memories.

A quick reckoning [My 2005. . . . ]:

I found a flat near the law school, and for the first time in my life, lived away from home. I sat through my very last class day as an Atenean and took my very last examination, at both times somewhat feeling that everything was just so anti-climactic. I graduated and got my JD degree, gave a speech, and ended four years of that bitter-sweet insanity called law school. I reviewed for the Bar Examinations. I turned 26, thinking I was getting too old for thinking that I was getting too old. I reviewed some more, got paranoid, lost sleep, did my best. I finally took the Bar, somewhat insecure and somewhat confident, glad, however, that it, too, would come to an end. I went to Boracay for the first time, fell in love with the sand and the sky, and felt that life had actually begun. I ventured to La Union, on a whim, to surf with unlikely travelmates. I put periods to question marks, got hurt and felt stupid, looked into the abyss and realized that no one was staring back, and saw the rest of my life in a whole new light. I visited Cebu, Bohol and Davao with my family. I saw the Philippine Philharmonic again and watched Man of La Mancha, at last. I bought myself a new camera with my own money, and got back into photography. I tried to live a little, ex mundo: went out with friends and family, became a pseudo-alcoholic, regularly came home at four in the morning. I experienced death for the first time, and I came out of it somewhat numbed. I missed some people and said good-bye to some others. I wanted to grow-up, I felt that somehow I did.

Reading through the list again, I feel somewhat exhausted and spent, reliving once again the emotional (if not, artificial) roller-coaster of the past twelve months. Were it only the Bar Examinations, then perhaps things would have been somewhat more bearable, but quite predictably, life throws a couple of curve balls, just to remind me that I am still human (and that I should have a sense of humor). Coelho's quote, therefore, seems more apt tonight, more than ever: “Closing cycles. Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because that no longer fits your life. Shut the door, change the record, clean the house, shake off the dust. Stop being who you were, and change into who you are.”

* * *

I close the door on 2005, therefore, with not only a renewed impression of hope, but also a heightened sense of expectation, knowing that, like the pattern of the past couple of months, this year will be the beginning of many new things; indeed, the first year of the rest of my life. I guess this is why beginnings are so exciting: because they are meant to somehow allow us to start with a clean slate, or, as J.B. Priestly put it, “a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning.”

In the spirit, therefore, of fresh tries and second chances, I now list events that I will look forward to, with the coming of 2006. Some of them, no doubt, are inevitable facticities all of us have to face; others, suntok sa buwan. But whether terms or conditions, I look forward to them nonetheless, because tonight, we are allowed to be hopeful.

1. My first day at work at my first job.
2. My first pay check.
3. The results of the 2005 Bar.
4. A happy 27th Birthday.
5. Boracay.
6. Friends, nightouts, and laughter.
7. Ever After.

* * *

In a couple of minutes, the year will come full circle. As we move from the old to the new, returning to the beginning and venturing forth again— revolutions in the stages of our lives— I send my New Year's wishes:

to kinder gods, and fiercer loves;
to brief jealousies, and even shorter griefs;
to second chances, and honest shots;
to wine, to beer, to sunsets, and coffee;
to travel, and music, and books, and food,
and kissing, and laughter;
to friends, and family;
and to everything else
that we should be grateful for this year:

FELIX ANNUS NOVUS! A Happy New Year!