Monday, May 31, 2021
I suddenly remember Ma'am Yañez, my Religious Studies teacher in high school. I love her. I remember having to read the Bible in front of the class. That's how I got rid of my public speaking stutter. [Yes! I stuttered when I read aloud in public when I was younger.] I practiced reading aloud the Bible in private at home, enunciating words like there was no tomorrow, because I knew she'd be calling people to read at the top of the class. In a sense, I owe my public speaking skills to a religion teacher. Also: by the time I was under her, she was no longer throwing Bibles at erring students. I love her.Labels: life, memory
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Sunday, May 30, 2021
4:49 PM |
Sayang Kaayo Uy
Gaguol ko nga gisapot ko nga wala ko kasabot nganong ang mga but-an sa atong politiko maoy mawala, human katong mga walay tarong ug pa-gimik ra sige mao nooy asenso kaayo—og buhi pa gyud, Enrile-style. Naay nisulti nako katong Domingo nga nikalit ra og nipanaw si Vice Mayor Alan Gel Cordova, paghuman nako’g yawyaw sa kasayang: “Ang daotan nga sagbot lisud mamatay.” Tinuod baya pud—pero unta dili. Asa ang hustisya sa kapalaran? Makasapot.
Perteng sapota, maka-Binisaya na lang ko ahat para lalum ang kaladmon sa kaguol.
Wala’y tawo sa Dumaguete makatuo nga mawala ra kalit kanato ang atong Bise Mayor. Kung imo syang lantawon katong buhi pa sya, kusgan man sya, baskog—makita gihapon ang iyang pagka-sundalo sa iyang lihok og sa iyang panagway. Kabalo ko nga grabe sya mo ehersisyo—tig-boksing sya, tig-wrestle, tig-gym, tig-biseklita. Molantaw ka niya, og hayag pa gyud ang iyang kaugma-on.
Sa katuohan, nakita na nako siya sukad pa sa una nga posibleng mahimo sya nga umaabot nga mayor sa atong syudad. Daghang pa syang mahimo para kanato, makatarongan ang iyahang bisyon sa Dumaguete—interesado sa maayong pamalakad, mapahinunguron sa mando sa mga tawo, gadumot sa mga kinaraang pamaagi sa mga tradisyonal nga mga politiko. Usa sya ka “breath of fresh air” sa atong politika, mao nang independente sya, walay vested interests, lisud makorakot.
Kasayang kaayo.
Dili na nako mahinumduman kanus-a mi nagka-amigo ni Bise Mayor. Dugay na. Bag-ong konsehal pa sya ato, pero dili nako malimot ang iyang kamahigalaon—kanang mura’g dugay namong kaila bisa’g bag-o pa mo nagkita. Daghan na kong nadungog sa iyang maayong reputasyon pagka-konsehal. Sa tinuod pa, ang mga tawo dili man kaayo ilado nila ang mga konsehal, pero ilado kaayo si Alan.
Si Alan Gel S. Cordova usa ka abogado, propesor sa law, opisyal sa militar, army scout ranger, alagad sa publiko, ug nagsilbing Bise Mayor karon sa Dumaguete City. Natawo sya sa 12 Hunyo 1967 sa Dumaguete, og ni-eskwela sa St. Louis School, benepisaryo sya sa usa ka scholarship program, og ni-gradwar nga salutatorian sa elementarya og valedictorian sa hayskol. Nagpadayon sya og eskwela sa Philippine Military Academy [PMA] sa dili pa sya na-rekrut sa United States Military Academy sa West Point, New York. Didto sya ni-gradwar sa 1989, nakahuman og degree sa Economics. Nagpadayon sya og Law sa Silliman University, nahuman niya sa 2003, og nagsugod sya og pagka-abogado sa Dumaguete. Didto nagsugod ang iyang pangandoy nga makatabang sa mga tawo sa Dumaguete. Daklit syang ni-trabaho sa Bureau of Immigration, pero giamuma na niya ang iyang pangandoy nga maka-serbisyo sya sa syudad sa lain og mahagiton nga kapasidad. Shoestring budget ra ang iyang kaya, pero nilansar gihapon sya para mahimong konsehal sa 2007, usa ka independente nga kandidato—og nakadaog sya, naabot ang 8th nga puwesto gawas sa pulo. Napamatud-an dayon niya nga usa sya ka revolutionary force sa konseho.
Sa usa ka sinulat ni Siegfred Bueno Mison para sa Business Mirror katong 2018, mabasa nato ang binuhat ni Cordova: “As a new member of the city council in 2007, Alan worked long hours, engaged all the people in the city, and introduced game-changing ordinances. For instance, Alan turned representatives of POs NGOs, CSOs and other marginalized sectors as quasi-members of City Council standing committees. This simple yet unique innovation of allowing these sectors to debate on the floor, propose ordinances and author resolutions gives them an active voice in policy-making. The presence of these sectors theoretically made city ordinances more reasonable, more proactive, and genuinely responsive. In Alan’s words, their presence also 'provided accountability for councilors who otherwise are too lazy to think of solutions or even attend committee meetings.' The concept is so revolutionary that other local governments in the province are in fact introducing the same thing—sectoral representation although without voting rights.”
Tungod sa iyang maayong pamalakad, si Cordova nahimong ilado sa mga tawo, usa ka “man-of-the-people” ang iyang dungog sa masa, gidayeg sya sa iyang propesyonalismo, makinaugalingon nga huna-huna, ug tinuud nga pag-higugma para sa Dumaguete.
Padayong sulat ni Mison: “When asked what [was] his secret in winning elections despite the obvious lack of funds, he shared that there [was] no substitute for hard work. He did not take any short cuts for him to be known in the community. His passion to make things better [was] what [drove] him to serve... [He had] the charisma to be able to talk to all kinds of people. He [had] the boyish smile that [could] disarm the harshest critic. When he decided to run for public office, he wanted to be very different from the usual politicians who Alan consider[ed] as virtually indifferent to the plight of the ordinary Dumagueteño. Prior to entering government service, Alan felt that he and the ordinary mortals in his city were mere statistics in the eyes of the traditional politicians, something to be exploited come election time by way of dole-outs and political gimmicks. Alan neither belong[ed] to a powerful political family nor [did] he have vast financial resources to run a campaign using guns, goons, and gold. Alan simply worked hard.”
Sa 2010, nidalagan sya og pagka Bise Mayor. Nidaog sya sa edad nga 43, ang pinakabata nga napili sa eleksyon sa anang posisyon. Matud pa sa Negros Chronicle atong tuiga nga nakadaog sya: “Cordova [was] up against the old tradition of mediocre practices, like coming unprepared during sessions, deploying dilatory tactics if ordinances [were] against vested interests, appropriating money in a zippy if it concern[ed] their political supporters, absenteeism, tardiness, and downright ignorance of the basic law and rules. [He] was junked by political parties saying that 'he was not winnable,' thus like a lone ranger, he battled his way as an independent, thus proving that Dumagueteños do not care about political parties but the quality of the candidates.”
Sa 2013, naghandom sya nga mahimong Mayor, pero napildi. Kani nga kapakyasan wala nitarog niya. Nidalagan na pud sya para sa konseho sa 2016, og karon iyang nadakpan ang pinakataas nga puwesto, og gipadayon ra gihapon niya ang iyang kusgan nga kadasig para sa serbisyong pampubliko. Sa 2019, nidagan na pud sya pagka-Bise Mayor nga independente nga kandidato, og nidaog. Gipangutana sya sa MetroPost giunsa nya pag-balanse sa tanan niyang bulohaton og responsabilidad. Matud niya: “I try my best to be self-disciplined, and to persevere, especially when things get rough; the mind is much stronger than we give it credit for.”
Gikan sa nahaunang konsehal nga si Manuel Arbon: “In an unexpected turn of events, we suddenly lost Alan, our ever active Vice Mayor. I had known him as a fellow Louisian since my elementary days. I knew him even before he became an accomplished man and public servant, in his own right. I knew him even before politics. And though we may not have been always on the same side of local politics of late, Alan and I remained civil. I pray that we found a spot in our hearts to forgive each other for our respective differences. He will surely be missed by all those who admired him for who he was and for what he stood for. I will miss him, too.”
Gikan ni Konsehal Joe Kenneth Arbas: “To all of us who believe in a better Dumaguete, it’s very painful to lose Alan Cordova. I am proud to have served with him. In him I have realized that our hope for honest, sincere, and committed public service is not merely a dream. We all saw how he served us.”
Gasubo ang Dumaguete karon sa pagpanaw sa usa ka maayong tawo og sa usa ka bantogan nga alagad sa publiko.
Labels: dumaguete, obituary, people, politics
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
9:42 AM |
Barkada, Circa 1950s
Currently watching Lou Salvador Sr.’s Barkada [1958] on Mike de Leon’s Casa Grande Vimeo page. A gritty precursor to Maryo J. de los Reyes’ Bagets [1984], it’s clearly a take-off from Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause [1955] with a dash of film noir and Dickens and a slew of Pinoy melodrama. I’ve been trying to define what attracts me to these old Filipino films on this site, besides being a cinephile and in spite of their bad fidelity. And then it struck me: it’s nostalgic throwback to my childhood in a Silliman Avenue neighborhood where I spent many afternoons watching RPN 9 classic Filipino cinema outside the window of my friend Ted-Ted’s mother’s house. We had no TV, so that was I got my entertainment as a very young boy in the late 80s.
[Also: Lou Salvador Jr. is so easy on the eyes.]Labels: film, life, memories, philippine cinema
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Saturday, May 29, 2021
5:51 PM |
A Literary Reason for Staying
Someone recently asked what is my reason for staying in Dumaguete. A long time ago, the same question was asked the literary power couple Edilberto and Edith Tiempo, and their answer was simple: “The Dumaguete shoreline.”
On good days, when I walk by the famed Rizal Boulevard, I get what they meant. There is something about this specific view that tugs at the heart, and convinces you this is ample reason for staying. But I’m starting with a Tiempo story because my own answer is different—but literary.
People forget that the literary is in the heart of being Dumaguetnon, or of being Oriental Negrense. We who live here live in a place that’s practically the heart of Philippine literature—or at least one of its vital organs—and not just because this is home for many of our beloved writers, but also because its landscape has been thoroughly etched in so many poems, so many short stories, so many essays, so many novels, and so many plays. And not just by our homegrown writers; Dumaguete lives in the pages penned from so many writers from other places, all inspired by what they see as its bucolic air and its gentle people (and often its mystery), seduced by the “literary” spirit of the place, with many of them coming here to incubate in that particular atmosphere.
I remember the American writer
Tim Tomlinson going for a diving vacation in Apo Island without prior knowledge of Dumaguete. “When I passed through the place,” he told me, “something struck me about it as a haven for writers for some reason.” Once he got back to Manila, he asked a poet friend, “What do you know about Dumaguete?” And that’s when he got to know a bit of Oriental Negrense literary history—that it is home to the oldest creative writing workshop in Asia, that it is home to two National Artists (
Edith Tiempo and
Eddie Romero), that it is home (and incubator) to so many contemporary writers who fill the pages of our anthologies and the shelves of our bookstores.
Grace Monte de Ramos is a poet from Siaton.
Simon Nino Anton Baena is a poet from Bais.
Rolin Miguel Cadallo Obina is a playwright also from Bais.
Bobby Flores Villasis is a poet, fictionist, and dramatist from Bayawan. (His short story collection,
Suite Bergamasque, is a sinful take on the denizens of the Rizal Boulevard sugar mansions, and many of his plays tackle the highs and lows of our landed class.)
Ernesto Superal Yee is a poet and fictionist from Tanjay. (His novel
Out of Doors is a scintillating love story with the backdrop of his city’s sugar country.)
Then there are the Dumaguete writers, like
César Ruìz Aquino (read
Chronicles of Suspicion),
David C. Martinez (read
A Country of Our Own),
Artemio Tadena (read
This Craft, As With a Woman Loved: Selected Poems),
Jose V. Montebon Jr. (read
Cupful of Anger, Bottle Full of Smoke),
Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas (read
Upon the Willows and Other Stories),
Myrna Peña-Reyes (read
Memory’s Mercy), and
Edilberto Tiempo (read
More Than Conquerors)—each of those books containing either glimpses or full vistas of life in Negros Oriental, for better or for worse (at least for drama’s sake).
A lot of them do reflect on some painful truths and social commentary—for example, the Dumaguete in
Lakambini Sitoy’s novel
Sweet Haven (hidden under the moniker Donostia) goes deep into social hypocrisy, and the Dumaguete in
Elsa Martinez Coscolluela’s play
In My Father’s House chronicles the sundering of family at the height of the Japanese Occupation during World War II. In Edith Tiempo’s story, “The Black Monkey,” a crippled woman battles her fears in the hills of Valencia also during the war.
Merlie Alunan has anthologized literary memories in
The Dumaguete We Know, and together with Villasis edited the seminal
Kabilin, the coffee-table book commemorating the provincial centenary in 1991. Dumaguete figures prominently in the fiction of
Aida Rivera Ford (read “There’s a War Out There!”),
Jaime An Lim (read “The Axolotl Colony”) and
Antonio R. Enriquez (read “Butong”), the poetry of
Anthony Tan (read “To a Tree Near a Boulevard”) and
Ricaredo Demetillo (read “Banyan Tree”), and the plays of
Lemuel Torrevillas (read “Looking for Edison or What’s the Name of the Guy Who Invented Something”), all of whom lived in the city in the formative years of their writing lives.
When you tackle the works of writers
not from the province, you’ll be surprised to find Negros Oriental at the heart of some of their works: discover Bacong’s Leon Kilat in
Krip Yuson’s novel
The Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café; climb the foothills of Valencia in
Gemino Abad’s poem “Casaroro Falls”; chart the heartbreaks of the Rizal Boulevard in the poems of
Cesar Aljama (“Dumaguete Nights”),
Ricardo M. De Ungria (“Dumaguete Blues”),
Nerisa Del Carmen Guevara (“Boulevard Tree”),
Jose Wendell Capili (“Hugging the Shore”),
Jeneen Garcia (“On a Night Boat From Dumaguete”), and
Diana T. Gamalinda (“Dumaguete”); dive into the dark (and sometimes fantastic or erotic) side of Dumaguete in the stories of
Marianne Villanueva (“Dumaguete”),
Leoncio Deriada (“Tartanilya”),
Rosario Cruz Lucero (“Conundrums”),
Dean Francis Alfar (“Six From Downtown”), and
Susan S. Lara (“The Other Regina”); court nostalgia in the essays of
Marjorie Evasco (“Tertullias at San Jose and a Family Album”),
Francis Macansantos (“Two Masters”), and
Timothy Montes (“Silliman in the Eighties: Of That Time, Second Person”).
There are our prominent historiographers who helped create the story of our past, such as
Earl Jude Paul Cleope (read
Bandit Zone: A History of the Free Areas of Negros Island During the Japanese Occupation),
Caridad Aldecoa Rodriguez (read
Negros Oriental: A History), and
T. Valentino Sitoy (read
A History of Christianity in the Philippines: The Initial Encounter), as well as cultural researchers whose outputs are foundational in Philippine cultural studies, such as
Elena Maquiso (read
Ulahingan and
Mga Sugilanon sa Negros) and
Priscilla Magdamo-Abraham (read
The Folk Songs of the Visayas).
I once hosted a “litera-tour” of Dumaguete sometime in 2017—and I loved the energy of literature brought to life in the actual geography. There’s a kind of voodoo in that conjunction. That’s the seaside bench in Villasis’ short story “Menandro’s Boulevard.” That’s the Redemptorist Church in Alunan’s poem “The Bells Count in Our Blood.” That’s Escaño in
Justine Yu’s “Sweet Baby.” That’s Jo’s Chicken Inato in my own story “A Tragedy of Chickens.”
An anthology should really be compiled, if you ask me.
So why do I stay in Negros Oriental? There are many reasons—but foremost among them is the privilege of being at home, literally, in the place conjured in the literary dreams of many writers I love and respect. It’s enough of a reason to stay.
Photo by Hersley-Ven Casero
Labels: art and culture, dumaguete, life, literature, negros, philippine history, philippine literature
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
I promised myself I’d be vocal about my mental health journey, to help end the stigma. So I must confess: the past eight years [especially the last five], I’ve been living with a cloud in my head. I forget things, I lose focus a lot, I get so much anxiety [exacerbated by the pandemic] because concentration took so much effort, which led to paralysis and depression. Chatting online, phone calls, and emails were big panic triggers for years and years. [Now you know!] And compounded by my perfectionism, my tendency to be detailed and structured, and my high frustration tolerance, I felt I was doomed. Writing was my only sure thing, where rivulets of my attention came together for real. People close to me know I rarely ask for help, so when I felt the need to seek professional help, I knew I could not handle things anymore. Thank God, I finally did. I got my diagnosis, and I’m going through treatment. My psychiatrist just messaged me: “It helps, huh? It’s been a while that you’ve been managing it on your own.” Yes! This photo is me chatting through Zoom with my best friends Ted Regencia [in Dapitan] and Kristyn Maslog-Levis [in Sydney] today. I finally was able to chat with them online after so many years! This was a breakthrough.
I’m grateful for the people who stood by me, and picked me up whenever I faltered in my own sense of self. Their kindness is the kiss of angels.Labels: coronavirus, life, mental health
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, May 28, 2021
2:47 PM |
Return to 'Beautiful Accidents'
It’s time. It’s been long out of print. Currently prepping the 10th anniversary edition of Beautiful Accidents, with three new stories, new introduction, and new epilogue. And a study guide!
Labels: books, life, philippine literature, queer, writing
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Thursday, May 27, 2021
5:57 PM |
Rehearsals of Letting Go
In October 1975, the poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote Alice Methfessel a letter. She was 64, and while widely acclaimed for her poetry, she felt increasingly that her life had been a long disappointment, full of heartache and loss, and riddled with anxiety—which her drinking also acerbated. Methfessel—Bishop’s companion, caretaker, and secretary, whom she met when she began teaching poetry at Harvard University—felt like the only anchor the poet had left in the continuing storms of her life. She had been, for the last eight years, also Bishop’s great love—and now Alice was going to marry another man.
“I wish I’d been able to write more and better poems these last few years,” Bishop wrote in that letter, “and poems
for you. Well, who knows, something may come along.”
Loss and heartbreak can be a great motivator for creativity—and something did come along in Bishop’s poetry to address her sorrows. By November, she was drafting a poem that was a lodestar, an accumulation of losses in the poet’s life—the trigger being the loss of Alice. By 1976, the poem “One Art” saw publication in the
New Yorker and has since been hailed as being among Bishop’s masterpieces, a beautiful lament of loss with a coda of bravery hastily tucked in at the end.
“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” the poem begins—and because it is a villanelle, the line comes back again and again throughout the poem’s six-stanza length. The message is persistent in its repetition, and in that muddle you can also glimpse a prayer that what it preaches is true.
It goes on with its catalogue of things readymade for these suggested rehearsals of loss. “Lose something every day” is the poem’s mantra—door keys, for example, and lost hours; a watch; names; places “you meant / to travel”; then ultimately bigger things, like cities, and rivers, and even entire continents. By the end, Bishop admits the reason for these exercises of losing: “—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture /I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident / the art of losing’s not too hard to master /though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.”
I love this poem. And I can see behind that bravado in the end: it’s a beautifully hollow promise, the poet knowing for sure there can really be no rehearsals for losing.
But I’ve always felt I could nevertheless try.
* * *
The third to the last time I had my heart broken, I could hear the phantom snare drums of the end pulsating through my days—a reminder of the wound that was left to fester, which needed just one more slight cut to release the full orchestra of separation.
Love dies, people tell us.
Nothing lasts forever. This is partly true. I’d been with M. for more than five years and by then we were already walking on tiptoes around each other, civil to a fault, and the way we must have looked at each other must be how one looked at a ghost. What kept us together was familiarity and the momentum of years. But I knew, deep in my guts, that this relationship was nearing its end—had known it for months actually. I had spent the summer of that year in the cool mountain air of Sagada, and on top of Calvary Hill, I remember praying to the universe to let the end be a meandering sort, like how a river slows down before it vanishes to sea.
By Christmas, our “river” was near the estuary, and the sight of sea felt like a promise. I longed with measured want for the end to come. There was simply no use denying that inevitability, although I was equally at a loss on how to initiate it. (Perhaps I was just a coward.) But how do you tell someone, “I don’t love you anymore,” and still be able to navigate the sudden loss of a long and constant companionship? While I accepted the possibility of loss, I had trouble imagining the new landscape of the fallout.
This was how I learned to rehearse it.
I taught myself to imagine the various scenarios of the breakup:
If this happens, then I will do this.
If he does this, then I will do this.
If I come to feel this, then I will force myself to do this.
I rehearsed all the permutations of the loss, imagining myself doing what I could to strengthen my own resolve every which way. And when the break finally did come, it was as a gift of the best scenario I could ever imagine: a parting of such surprising quiet. That December morning in 2008, he gathered his things in silence while I feigned sleep. There were small sounds of hangers being dispossessed of clothes, of bags being zipped, of doors being exited, of gates being closed. Of such sounds, I quickly learned, are partings made of. There were no angry words or solemn goodbyes. For a moment I panicked and wanted to rush out and beg him to come back—but I’d also rehearsed this, too: I made myself keep still. I told myself:
This is what you wanted. I breathed deep, stayed put, and counted to ten.
Or fifty.
Soon it was over.
* * *
Some loss you can be more or less prepared for. Loss itself is an existential exercise, a rehearsal for the end of things, an incremental fulfillment of the truism that we are all born into this world naked, and we leave it naked.
I used to do philately. Starting sometime in grade school, collecting stamps became one of my abiding passions—an obsession, really. Like all hobbies, it began as a spark informed with interest and curiosity, coupled with an innate need for collecting things, and then ballooned into something else: first, a completist’s desire to have all the nations in the world represented in my collection, and then later, to possess the most obscure and the most valuable.
I still remember my earnest weekly rituals of soaking scissored pieces of envelopes in basins of water to safely remove the stamps on them, and then overnight drying them on towels spread over the dining table.
In grade school, my daily allowance was five pesos, and I’d carefully budget it so that I had enough left over to purchase one packet of stamps from a certain school supplies store along what was then Alfonso XIII Street in Dumaguete.
Over time my collection became immense and included various stamp albums that accommodated first-day covers, and several that housed really old European stamps. I know for sure that some of those were of immense value. These albums came with me as I transferred from the family house to a rented bachelor’s pad in Tubod, along with my library of books and movies on videotape. This is to say that my independent living came saddled with so many things, often without the necessary space to accommodate them all. Sometimes there was only a space on the floor to house them.
One day I hired to clean my pad a couple of people my mother had recommended—and in my absence during the cleanup, they threw away the plastic bags on the floor containing my stamp albums, thinking they were trash. I found out about it too late, and by then the whole collection I’d assembled over the years was probably in the city dumpsite.
I felt myself go numb. My recourse was resignation to the fact at hand: no berating of the cleaners would bring back those precious stamps—and if I had asked them to pay for the damages, would they be able to pay the sum I’d be quoting? Probably not.
“Those are just things,” I told myself.
Are those things just ‘things’?
This was my first real lesson in letting go.
* * *
About four years ago, in that pad in Tubod I still live in, termites suddenly appeared out of the blue. I’d been living in the same apartment for years, and have weathered all kinds of housekeeping catastrophe: rats and shrews that scurry about in infuriating boldness, ravenous ants that ate through electric wirings and nearly caused a fire, molds, and several floods that ravaged furniture and books and papers. But termites are something else.
They are a menace of quiet devastation—and they know just how to keep themselves invisible for so long until their presence can no longer be denied. Books and things on your shelves that look normal on the surface soon, upon touching, turn out to be hollow and riddled with dirt on the inside—eaten by these tiny, hungry beasts.
I used to have two magazine stacks, one near my front door where I kept dailies and magazines I planned to throw out, and one near my bedroom where I kept magazines and periodicals I’d published in. One day I noticed that the stack near the front door had odd shades of dirt about them, and when I looked closer, I was shocked to see that termites had made the entire stack a full architecture of hardened mud. All those newspapers and magazines were lost in a mishmash of paper and dirt, and there was no saving them. Then I found the same thing with my second stack—but I was lucky enough to rescue most of the publications that featured my stories and essays. Termites feel like a lottery you don’t want to participate in.
Have you ever cleared out a termite mound inside your house? It is a task not for the faint-hearted—flecks of dirt fly everywhere, and the hardened mud is difficult to dislodge, and when you finally do, you have to contend with your squimishness of having to see the white little bodies of termites suddenly going frantic everywhere. They swarm. When they get to you, their bites feel like tiny scissors nipping at you. But they die easily once exposed to air—and after I shower them with the toxic mist of Baygon. Their corpses leave terrible marks on the floor.
Ever since that initial encounter, I have waged many battles with them. They’ve taken to many of my books, and they break my heart.
They ate my one precious hardbound volume of all of Shakespeare’s plays, and the hardbound collected fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. They’ve eaten my Salman Rushdies, my Lorrie Moores, my David Mitchells. They ate the Bible my mother gave me. They began eating my treasured copy of Gardner’s Art Through the Ages—a hefty volume I paid top yen for when I studied in Japan—but discovered the damage early enough to salvage the book. They devoured most of my collection of gay literature [which I collected while writing my MA thesis]. They’ve mostly left my Filipiniana collection alone—until last week, when I discovered them munching on all of my Jessica Zafras, all of my Menchu Aquino Sarmientos, one or two Krip Yusons, and was beginning to wreak havoc on my Eliza Victorias.
For a bibliophile and writer like me, losing my book collection in increments like this is an exercise of sustained loss. I used to grieve every title lost. Now I cage my heart when I have to throw another beloved book into the trash.
They’re only books, I tell myself.
The art of losing is learning to delude yourself.
* * *
Letting go can be a painful part of life. But according to Buddhism, we must learn to let go, to banish away attachment and desires—if we are to experience happiness. This does not mean we are not to be without care. We can care for people, we can care for things—but the experience of life is that we can love all things without clinging to them for survival.
“You can only lose what you cling to,” the Buddha famously said.
The Vietnames monk Thich Nhat Hanh also once said, “Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If, in our heart, we still cling to anything—anger, anxiety, or possessions—we cannot be free.”
But it’s not just the Buddhists who believe this. Seneca, the Roman philosopher, once said: “The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.”
I’m still trying to learn from their wise words.
The art of losing is philosophy put to heartbreaking practice.
* * *
But I also wish all varieties of loss could be rehearsed this way.
My friend Ruby lost her father to COVID-19 on January 23 this year—and there is no rehearsing that kind of loss, even in the middle of a pandemic. “It was fast,” she told us. “He was already recovering but then things happened—and the next thing we knew, we never got to see him again. He was isolated for more than a week before he was brought to the hospital.”
I could only imagine the tyranny of this loss like how it unfolded in the very beginning of the pandemic—when the world locked down in 2020 and we were given snippets of how it was in the various epicenters of the consuming disease: stricken parents and grandparents separated and then isolated from their families, their sole connection perhaps only through grainy video chats via smartphones and iPads—and no possibilities of real goodbyes when the end came to claim them, their bodies zipped up in bags and soon dispatched to crematoriums without funerals.
I’ve lost some friends and associates, too, to the virus—but their demise is too surprising for our own rehearsals of losing them. There is no rehearsing the fact that Em Mendez will no longer be writing plays. There is no rehearsing the fact that Domini Torrevillas will no longer be writing her columns. There is no rehearsing the fact that Fr. Gilbert Luis Centina III will no longer be writing his poems.
The names of people we’ve lost continue to mount though.
Is this a kind of rehearsal?
But there is no rehearsing the pain—or is there? There is only learning to be numbed and to be accepting of what has come and what loss we have to bear—or can we? Eventually you and I can learn to let go—but I know that beyond the acceptance, there is still learning to contend with the ghosts.
Labels: coronavirus, life, love, mental health
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, May 26, 2021
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 74.
Labels: philippine literature, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, May 23, 2021
11:22 AM |
Fragile Boy, Strong Heart
Visual artist Ramon Adonis Catacutan gifted me with this sculpture a few years back. I’ve always loved this. I call it “Fragile Boy, Strong Heart,” and it resonates so completely with me. It now occupies a prime spot in my workplace and serves as reminder and challenge.
Labels: art, life, mental health
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, May 21, 2021
6:24 PM |
The New Normal
It’s the middle of May in the second year of the pandemic, and everywhere I go in my little city, I feel this undercurrent of uncertainty that hovers just above the din of everyday life. You could mistake the current bustle for the fervor of pre-pandemic times, were it not for one unmistakable thing: you still see most people go about in public in facemasks, the regulation white and light blue of last year’s model now giving way to assorted fashionable ones of varying material and quirks in design—which tells you this: the pandemic has gone on for so long that facemasks have ascended to the level of fashion.
I’ve mostly resisted this.
My facemask is still regulation white and light blue.
My face shield is still that simple frame fitted with acetate plastic.
They both have the severe look of the hospital about them, which I need, I think. They remind me to still be on my toes, and their no-nonsense aesthetic is my token that the dark times are still ongoing, and there is no vanquishing this virus yet. Somehow I feel that the moment I allow myself fancier facemasks and face shields I have somehow contributed to the deadening responses to the battle still being waged.
I cannot make fashion out of a pandemic necessity—but that’s just me. The moment I do, I’ve surrendered.
And yet I am not entirely wrong in my apprehensions and misgivings. A few days ago, on May 18, the Silliman University Medical Center—one of Dumaguete’s biggest hospitals—issued a public advisory announcing that they’d reached critical capacity status regarding their COVID-19 accommodations. “Admissions of COVID-19 patients,” the advisory read, “will be temporarily suspended as all beds are fully occupied.” This prompted comparisons of bed capacity dedicated to COVID-19 care among all the other major hospitals within the Negros Oriental capital: [1] Silliman University Medical Center, 51 beds, 52 actually occupied; [2] Negros Oriental Provincial Hospital, 31 beds, all occupied; [3] Holy Child Hospital, 20 beds, 18 occupied; [4] ACE Dumaguete Doctors Hospital, 14 beds, all occupied; and [5] Negros Polymedic Hospital, 13 beds, 12 occupied. Two days later, two cases were admitted, marking full bed capacity for Dumaguete—perhaps the first time it has reached this grim milestone since the pandemic started. And the cases continue to rise. By May 21, in Dumaguete alone, there are 155 active cases out of a total of 832, with 639 recoveries and 38 dead.
Thirty-eight dead.
Certainly a small number when compared to the 3.43 million dead listed worldwide—but for a city as small as Dumaguete, 38 is a considerable number.
We already know of many friends and family who have contracted it, each one with their own peculiar war story, since COVID-19 is such a strange virus it affects people in very different ways. I know several who only had mild fevers, others with malaise and loss of the sense of taste. I know one whose bout with the virus seems to have quelled the tremors of his Parkinson’s. I know many who have lost loved ones—mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, cousins, assorted friends.
And yet there is now an air of contagious complacency embracing Dumaguete—and I have feeling, also everywhere else. On social media, most people still sing the chorus of “Amping!” that we have come to accept as the new norm of a greeting, which has helped us navigate the novel protocols of safety and the miasma of uncertainty. But that caution is now strangely absent when you make the rounds of the city.
People are now having parties that are “socially-distanced” in name only—perhaps to escape irate comments when the incriminating photos are uploaded to Facebook.
People are flocking to restaurants with such gusto that one new establishment has instituted a “reservations only” rule to help stem the crowd—and if you know the Dumaguete food scene, you know this rule is rare, and almost alien to the way we dine out.
It’s all complacency. This is the latest fugue state of our evolving sense of “normal.” We have been digesting the cold statistics for far too long, we have learned to tune out the still ongoing horrors. We are so bored with locked down realities that defiance has become our new esteem. We are swimming in the hopefulness of the coming vaccine that we have begun to play at recklessness.
Look, we’ve begun to think,
the U.S. is now announcing that masks would soon be a thing of the past—and for some reason this has given so many of us, in our Third World reality, permission to let our guard down.
Did the pandemic not change us in a fundamental way?
I had hoped the “new normal” would no longer be defined by the frailties of our society. To quote playwright Edward Delos Santos Cabagnot: “The global pandemic and months of forced isolation should have brought humanity to its senses. Finally forswear war, social injustice, greed, and corruption.” And complacency.
And yet.
Cabagnot continues: “Yet here we are still. I’m afraid we’re failing this final exam. Be very afraid.”
Are we failing this final exam for real?
Will we revert to our old selves?
Will we still insist on thinking that we, each of us, do not matter in the grand scheme of things, and so continue on thinking only for ourselves?
I don’t have the answers, no one has. Only time will tell.
We were buying takeout chicken at Jet and Jo’s Sizzling House along EJ Blanco Drive a few nights ago, and we had done the usual routines in the name of the theatre of safety—facemasks on, temperature checked, names logged, hands washed in disinfecting solution. But while we were waiting for our orders to come, one guy was able to come in, sans mask, sans protocol, and was able to order without a hitch and so casually like there was no raging pandemic in our midst.
I wanted to shout at him.
I wanted to berate the attendant on duty.
But I kept my quiet, glaring as I went about my waiting.
Only a few days before that, I had visited my elderly mother—she’s 87—at the family house I’d been loath to visit because of the pandemic. Mother was overjoyed with the sight of me, and I felt happy—but afterwards, I was stricken with this subterfuge of misgivings: was I really sure I was not a carrier of the virus when I hugged her, when I kissed her, when we gabbed about this thing and that? Because I had been going about my days now with more than a modicum of the old normal—meeting people, eating in restaurants, watching plays and exhibits, gallivanting in public parks—so I was not entirely sure I did not inhale the virus at any point of those interactions. And to unknowingly infect someone I love because I have learned to live on the edge of a pandemic knife was certainly troublesome for me.
I was thinking of my mother when I raged quietly at the unmasked guy in Jet and Jo’s Sizzling House.
And through all these, we lurch on to some vague future that hints of some promise, of some reassurances.
The 10 PM curfew is still on full force, and everyone obeys.
Most people still put on facemasks.
And the city has begun vaccinating senior citizens only yesterday—which made me dash out a missive to my brother Dennis: “Have you registered Mama?”
Thankfully he replied: “Already did.”
I guess it is this wish that sustains us now—in panic and in complacency—that on the other side of this historic upheaval, we will still be left standing, breathing and alive, with the ones we love.
Labels: coronavirus, dumaguete, life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, May 19, 2021
7:31 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 73.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Saturday, May 15, 2021
Lookit what the boyfie surprised me with for our 8th anniversary staycation! A chocolate cake complete with drawings of our two cats, Mouschi and Pusheen! I’m in love.
Labels: life, love
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, May 14, 2021
7:02 PM |
My Pandemic Cat
Mouschi was a grey cat with sparse spots of white here and there. He was quick to the ways of the streets, and his sense of curiosity was as strong as his appetite. He was not really mine, but he came to my life sneakily, without warning, from off Aldecoa Drive one quiet May day in 2020—and claimed me as his.
This is the way of many cats: one minute you’ve managed to live life without one of these furry, meowing creatures by your side, and the next minute the only shopping you do at the grocery store is for the cans of wet food they’ve come to expect as their privilege of bestowing you, their human, the right to [sometimes] pet them.
I didn’t even see him the first day he made my dwelling his property. It was the third month of lockdown in Dumaguete, and like most people, I subsisted on long lonely days without company in the solitary quiet of my small apartment, and on what was left of my canned food after that dash of panic-buying in late March. My pantry was all kinds of sardines, corned beef, meat loaves, and the like—which by May outgrew their welcome with my palate. I had grown to actively disdain them.
“Be thankful you have food,” my boyfriend—whom I haven’t seen in about eight weeks—texted me when I complained. “So many families can’t even eat two proper meals these days.”
Of course, he was right.
But I looked at the clump of corned beef before me, and I shuddered.
I did eat—but I knew most of it would end up in the trash. Until I heard the meowing of kittens outside my door. When I peered outside, there were four kittens scrambling about in my patio, their teeny meows a sudden endearing interlude to my lockdown boredom.
They must be hungry, I thought—and then I spied their mother cat coming for them. She was a thin white cat with a black triangle on her head—and for some reason, she reminded me of all the cats I had before—a menagerie of kitties with the names of Minggay, Mingky, Louie, Blackie, and more recently a Pusheen. I love cats. I’m a Leo, and on good days I think myself a cat in many aspects of my personality. When I love someone deep enough, I meow at them. I like that cats exist in that negotiation of relationship where they prefer being let alone but can be needy enough at times to commander your attention by rubbing themselves against your legs, or taking charge of whatever contraption you’re tinkling with [a laptop, a piano, a notebook]. I like that cats disdain [and positively ignore] overt displays of getting their attention, preferring instead the simple act of you blinking at them very slowly. They’re low maintenance, most of the time.
But I’ve also resolved not to have pets anymore—at my age, I felt I was done with being Noah, having had a lifetime of caring for just as many dogs, hamsters, guinea pigs, a rabbit, several aquariums of fish, white mice, and once, a cage of lovebirds. I thought the commitment to their welfare was something I felt I could no longer afford to have in my increasingly busy existence—the veterinary necessities, the feeding, the housekeeping.
And so when I saw this white mother cat and her hungry kittens, I felt conflicted with the sudden stirrings of creature love inside me. I went, “Awwww…” and proceeded to feed them with what was left of my corned beef.
But the white cat hissed and snarled, and while it did eat what I was proffering, it was all done in a dance of mistrust and fear. She would advance, then back away, hissing. She was clearly hungry and needed the food I was giving—but to hell with my displays of friendliness. I was not to be trusted. She hissed like there was no tomorrow.
And then, out of the blue, in swept into the patio this grey cat with sparse spots of white here and there. It sidled up to me, rubbed itself against my legs, and ate the corned beef. But the cat was also surprisingly not greedy—he went over to the white cat and the four kittens and guided them over to where the food was.
“You’re such a gentlepuss,” I told him.
He blinked at me.
“Is she your wife?” I asked him.
He blinked at me.
“You’re adorable,” I said.
He blinked at me.
And from then on, the grey cat with sparse spots of white here and there was always there in my patio, every lunchtime, every dinnertime, meowing to signal its presence, always alone. When I ran out of canned foods to feed him, I did a quick grocery run to Lee Super Plaza to buy him cat food.
And eventually from the patio, he found himself indoors, made himself king of my apartment, snoozed on what became his favorite floormat—and when it was time to go out [to urinate, to defecate, to mate], he’d meow at me, his soulful eyes looking straight into my soul, and I’d know exactly what he wanted. Science says cats learn to do a specific register of meowing to communicate with their humans—every meowing is tailored, and humans eventually learn to pick up their specific meanings.
I’m hungry. I want to go out. You’re hurting me. I need you to rub my belly. I’m ignoring you right now—go away. And when this happened, I knew that this grey cat with sparse spots of white here and there has claimed me.
I named him Mouschi because I was watching
The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) around the time he came to me. In that George Stevens’ film adaptation of the real-life travails of this Jewish girl during World War II, there was one fraught scene where, in the tiny attic she hid out in with her family, they all had to freeze in deadly quiet in order not to attract the prying eyes [and ears] of the Nazi soldiers searching the floor below them for human contraband like her. Any false move, any tiny sound could lead to their discovery—sending them all to certain death. And while in that frozen state, their cat—Mouschi—was heedless in his command of the room, his movement here and there a perfect contrast to the still humans, his occasional bumping into things a source of extreme tension for the scene.
“What a cat,” I said then.
When I beheld this grey cat with sparse spots of white here and there, I always said, “What a cat,” and then: “I’ll name you Mouschi.”
It felt perfect. The cramp lockdown of the Frank family in that tiny Dutch attic felt like a reflection of our cramp lockdown in the midst of a pandemic. The enemy for both was kind of a specter: the Gestapo, who could appear any moment, and the coronavirus, which might be invisible, but could strike you anytime. And the Franks and their friends hid for 25 months in their secret annex before being discovered by the Gestapo, while I was already going crazy with my third month of lockdown.
The grey cat with sparse spots of white here and there had to be named “Mouschi.”
“I bet he leads a double life,” my boyfriend told me. “I bet he goes to another house where his name is Gloria.”
“Well, with me he’s Mouschi, and I guess he’s my cat now.”
I bought him a collar—to tell the world someone’s looking after this cat. I bought him his favorite wet food—Whiskas’ Ocean Fish flavor. I allowed him his freedom to go in—he loved naps—and to get out whenever he wanted. And in turn, he gave me lockdown company.
I didn’t think I needed it, until sometimes, when he’d meow to get out, I’d turn to Mouschi, and say, “Please stay. I don’t want to be alone.” And he’d stay.
He hasn’t been home for a few weeks now. Throughout the spread of the pandemic year, Mouschi was always there to greet us when we came home. He knew the sound of my boyfriend’s car, and would come rushing to us the nights we went home late. Sometimes he’d disappear for a day or two, but he’d always come home, his meowing immense, his appetite intact.
But he hasn’t been home for a few weeks now.
Is he lost? Is he hurt in a ditch somewhere? (He came home once filthy to the bone, obviously a case of him falling into a ditch. When I bathed him, his resistance to the gushing water was meek; he knew he needed the bath.) Is his other family who probably calls him Gloria keeping him to themselves? Is he … dead? We speculate endlessly, but we know the answer is probably not forthcoming.
And so we can only mourn for our missing cat.
He came to my life without preamble, I think to keep me company all throughout those tumultuous pandemic months filled with the demons of anxiety and loneliness. He disappeared exactly a year later—hopefully to give the gifts he gave me to someone else who probably needed them now.
Mouschi the Street Cat really wasn’t mine, and wasn’t mine to keep. But what I’ll keep is gratefulness for his gracious feline company when I needed it without realizing it was a lifeline I didn’t know I could have.
Labels: coronavirus, life, pets
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
1:16 PM |
Writing to Live with PEN
THIS IS HAPPENING TOMORROW! I'll be part of
Free the Word!, PEN International’s roaming event series of contemporary literature from around the world. The Free the Word! team works with PEN Centres, festivals, and book fairs to develop an international network of literary events, with each event rooted in its local culture, but international in outlook.
To register and attend, PEN members should kindly email philippinepen2021@gmail.com with the subject “ALL IN.” The general public may watch the event live on May 15, Saturday at 2 PM at the FB pages of the
Cultural Center of the Philippines,
CCP Intertextual Division, or
Philippine Center of International PEN.
Labels: PEN Philippines, philippine literature, writers, writing
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, May 12, 2021
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 72.
Labels: philippine literature, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Saturday, May 08, 2021
3:23 PM |
To Be a Better Man
I’ve been working on my mental health more decisively of late, and crucial to it is counselling [really trying my best to book an appointment, which is haaaard] and four realizations from last week’s ruminations: [1] that I really need to get up each day, and get out of the house, even with insomniac nights, [2] that despite my anxieties, the world will not end [a piece of wisdom from the 1969 film A Boy Named Charlie Brown], [3] that if I take stock of things I’ve done now instead of worrying about what’s undone, I’d actually be happily surprised with what I’ve accomplished, and [4] that considering the first three, to always end each day in gratitude. One step at a time, baby.
Labels: life, love, mental health
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, May 07, 2021
9:00 AM |
On Uncommon Kindness
I’ve been thinking more and more about kindness recently, perhaps because of the spate of community pantries mushrooming all over the country. In Dumaguete, several soon took root in the neighborhoods of Bantayan [two of them] and Piapi—at least as far as I know specifically—and I’m sure there are or have been more. This has been such an amazing phenomenon, an example of the good kind of virality, and I believed it when people started saying something like, “Kindness is revolutionary.”
Kindness is also contagious.
It certainly felt that way. The community pantry revolution was unprecedented and unplanned—and all it took was the smallest of gestures by an individual, a local furniture designer, who felt frustrated by the almost willful inaction by the government in providing for the most basic of relief to its neediest of citizens in our prolonged pandemic season. Ana Patricia Non took out a tiny bamboo cart along Maginhawa Street in Quezon City, accepted and gave out in-kind donations [usually grocery items], and unknowingly launched a revolution.
Not to say there has been no government help—the
ayuda of the rolling Bayanihan programs are there, if meager, but because it is government, the process is necessarily bureaucratic. Most certainly, when you are dying of hunger, it will almost be an impossibility to submit yourself to process, to paper works, to patience waiting in long lines.
Community pantries
are a band-aid effort—it does not change the inherent unfairness and inequality of the system—but nonetheless they are very necessary, because they are able to cut through the bullshit, and because they are answerable only to their grassroots origins, they are spared from the opportunistic shenanigans of politicians and the profit-motivated magnanimity of corporations.
Community pantries are the embodiment of kindness, something that has been magnified in the pandemic. There’s a new term for this: “caremongering,” which is solidarity and mutual help turned into concrete community action.
A friend of mine, Lea Sicat Reyes, recently recounted this story: “I brought Dad to Ace Hospital for his routine ECG test. I was worried, given his heart history and his age, to bring him to the hospital amid the pandemic, but it had to be done. As soon as we reached Ace, I asked Dad to wait in the car so I could then go to the laboratory to secure a spot in the queue. When I got to the lab, there were already around four people waiting for their turn.
“I requested the
kuya before me to save my spot when it was almost Dad’s turn so I could run back to the parking lot where Dad was waiting in the car. I explained that Dad was 78 years old and had cardiovascular co-morbidities so I wanted to avoid unnecessarily exposing him to the steady traffic of people going in and out of the hospital.
“
Kuya agreed, and I thanked him. I sat on one of the steel benches in the intent to wait for Dad’s turn. From a short distance, I observed the four talk to each other. The lady who was first in the line came up to me and said that they agreed that my Dad could go first.
“Of course, I initially refused the offer knowing that they had been waiting a lot longer than I did, but they insisted. I truly appreciate how four strangers extended such kindness to me and my Dad. Wherever [and whoever] they are, I pray that God will return such kindness and generosity a hundredfold.”
Kindness!
I remember too my boyfriend and his mother who took care of me when I had mild COVID last December—because they didn’t have to, but I was alone in my apartment and needed help in my daily straining for survival, at least during the long quarantine.
Kindness!
I remember going on a grocery run last June, and a tricycle driver gave me a free ride from the deserted downtown to my apartment, groceries in tow.
Kindness!
Non is kind to the core, I’m sure of that. But people are generally not kind, to be honest. They are however performatively kind—usually when there is an audience involved and pictorials and pubmats can be splashed on social media—but nonetheless they are often enough. I won’t begrudge it. Real and performative kindness are still aberrations to the system we all live in, which is low-key cruel and unkind. I feel that way all the time when an email gets circulated at work, asking for
abono for someone who’s sick or dying. Charity tugs at the heart—but I’m also thinking, “These colleagues wouldn’t have to submit themselves to begging in the first place if they were properly paid.”
I’m not sure I’m being cynical. You could call me a Hobbesian—but even Thomas Hobbes wasn’t entirely pessimistic when he famously wrote that our natural condition was “solitary, poor, [and] nasty brutish.” [Nor was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, his philosophical opposite who countered that human nature is essentially good, entirely optimistic either.]
Robin Douglass, a senior lecturer in political theory at King’s College London, once clarified: “As it happens, Hobbes didn’t really think that we’re naturally evil. His point, rather, is that we’re not hardwired to live together in large scale political societies. We’re not naturally political animals like bees or ants, who instinctively cooperate and work together for the common good. Instead, we’re naturally self-interested and look out for ourselves first and foremost. We care about our reputation, as well as our material wellbeing, and our desire for social standing drives us into conflict as much as competition over scarce resources.
“If we want to live together peacefully, Hobbes argued, we must submit ourselves to an authoritative body with the power to enforce laws and resolve conflicts. Hobbes called this the ‘sovereign’. As long as the sovereign preserves peace then we shouldn’t question or challenge its legitimacy, for that way leads back to the state of nature, the worst possible place we could find ourselves. It doesn’t matter whether we personally agree with the sovereign’s decisions. Politics is characterized by disagreement and if we think that our own political or religious convictions are more important than peaceful coexistence then those convictions are the problem, not the answer.”
Hobbes was a witness to the unbelievable horrors of a civil war, which informed his worldview, but to dismiss his ideas as “bleak” is to not see that he actually saw lasting peace as a possible achievement, but one that was rare and fragile. And one that’s subject to an authority that promises and actively works for that peace.
But wasn’t that also why in 2016, sixteen million voted overwhelmingly for a possible sovereign who promised “change is coming,” gave short deadlines to its promises [“six months,” “one year”]—but is now found unashamedly wanting?
Douglass continues: “On the Hobbesian analysis, an authoritative political state is the answer to the problem of our naturally self-interested and competitive nature. [But] Rousseau viewed things differently and instead argued that we are only self-interested and competitive now because of the way that modern societies have developed. He thought that in pre-agricultural societies—he took travellers’ reports of indigenous American peoples as his model—humans could live a peaceful and fulfilling life, bound together by communal sentiments which kept our competitive and egoistic desires in check.
“For Rousseau, everything started to go wrong once humans perfected the arts of agriculture and industry, which eventually led to unprecedented levels of private property, economic interdependence, and inequality.
Inequality breeds social division. Where societies had once been united by strong social bonds, the escalation of inequality soon turned us into ruthless competitors for status and domination. The flipside to Rousseau’s belief in natural goodness is that it is political and social institutions that make us evil, as we now are… Rousseau thought that once human nature has been corrupted the chances for redemption are vanishingly slight. In his own day, he held out little hope for the most advanced commercial states in Europe and, although he never witnessed the onset of industrial capitalism, it’s safe to say that it would have only confirmed his worst fears about inequality. The sting in the tale of Rousseau’s analysis is that, even if Hobbes was wrong about human nature, modern society is Hobbesian to the core and there’s now no turning back.”
And that’s the catch: the inherent goodness Rousseau highlighted is a kind of original state to which there really is no turning back to. We are ensnared into a system—call it late capitalism, if you want—and we are forever corrupted.
Unkindness runs in our veins [Hobbes] and in our systems [Rousseau], that to be kind truly
is revolutionary.
But we
need kindness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing in
Essays: First Series (1841), declared: “We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. Maugre all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether. How many persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor, and who honor us! How many we see in the street, or sit with in church, whom, though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with! Read the language of these wandering eye-beams. The heart knoweth.
“The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain cordial exhilaration. In poetry and in common speech, the emotions of benevolence and complacency which are felt towards others are likened to the material effects of fire; so swift, or much more swift, more active, more cheering, are these fine inward irradiations. From the highest degree of passionate love to the lowest degree of good-will, they make the sweetness of life.”
He continues with this declaration emphasizing why kindness helps: “Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection.”
In the past year, one thing we have seen all over the world is that kindness can prevail even in difficult times. Remember when people came together to sing on balconies in Italy?
Kindness. Remember when people willingly shared their talents online last year to stave off the deadly boredom of the lockdown?
Kindness.
This kindness didn’t start with the current pandemic. You could go all Rousseau and say it was always there in people. What is true is that the pandemic, ironically, has given us a space to see kindness modeled, which has given us permission to be compassionate. To borrow an observation made by the University of Edinburgh: “What was hidden and unremarked upon is being noticed as an essential part of our existence, enabling us as a society to keep faith in the future and to believe that we can get through this.”
The psychologist Paul Gilbert once suggested that compassion can become a driver of change, and that compassionate action often involves individual acts of courage: to support people in distress, to stand up for the oppressed, or to challenge authority when the wrong course has been taken. The community pantry revolution checks all these.
Compassion can also lead to an increased sense of well-being, no matter if this altruistic behavior is expressed through volunteering, charitable donations, or acts of kindness to people we do or do not know personally. In fact, studies have shown that engaging in “prosocial behaviours” when interacting with strangers or acquaintances can lead to better overall mental health.
The Canadian psychologist Jennifer Stellar says that compassion—along with gratitude and awe—allows us to look outside our own personal needs to focus on someone or something else: “I think the idea is that the self, the ego, can be noisy—it can be negative. It can be self-deprecating, so sometimes we need a little break.” The act of helping others then can be a welcome distraction from the strains of the pandemic.
Another study showed that kindness is really beneficial to people,
especially if they are struggling. They become more motivated to address their own problems after being offered the opportunity to help others struggling with the same issue. They experience a much-needed boost in confidence.
It’s perhaps all biochemistry: all oxytocin, which acts as antidote to cortisol, the stress hormone. Oxytocin helps lower our blood pressure, and reduces inflammation and free radicals in our cardiovascular system, which causes tissue damage and ageing.
Given that, how do we exactly “do” or cultivate kindness then?
Model kindness, that’s one.
Encourage kindness, that’s another— to get involved and supporting your local communities like how Ana Patricia Non did it.
Notice kindness, that’s another— to recognize and validate when you notice people being kind and supportive.
Cut some slack is another— to understand that everyone is experiencing the effects of the pandemic differently, so we must offer support instead and be more understanding.
And finally: be kind to yourself—to cut your own self some slack. How? By not expecting perfection, and aiming just for “good enough.” This is my own hard lesson.
I only realized this a few days ago myself.
Like love, to be kind to oneself is perhaps the greatest gift of all in our prolonged pandemic season.
I wrote in my journal then: “I should be more gentle with myself. I should stop beating myself down for not ‘doing enough.’ I only just realized I’ve actually accomplished quite a lot this past week: I wrote two major essays and one art review, finished phase 1 of a project, sent out a book manuscript, proofread a short story due for publication in a major magazine, prepped a re-publication of another book in time for its 10th anniversary, and managed a very busy month for three entities in my social media management sideline. All these on top of battling crippling anxiety attacks and depression. I should be more gentle with myself, for my mental health’s sake.”
It’s difficult to do—but be kind, anyway. To others, to your self.
Art by Experience Life
Labels: coronavirus, kindness, life, mental health
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Thursday, May 06, 2021
2:51 PM |
The Four Faces of Our Current Woes
You know how it is when things sometimes frighten us that our reflex is to laugh out loud, perhaps in an ironic attempt to keep the demons at bay? I have just seen the first important theatrical experience of our long pandemic season—and I found myself laughing in that painful, silent way when you try to keep your chortles in quiet mode.
Not because the play is funny, although there are certainly deft comic touches here and there, but because what you are seeing is so reflective of our everyday horrors, elevated to such absurdity, that the only way to process all that it presents is to recoil, then to reconsider, and finally to discharge a nervous chuckle or two. Catharsis is the end goal of
Fighting the Invisible, opening on May 7, Friday at 7 PM at the Sidlakang Negros Village Function Hall, with another performance slated on May 8, Saturday. And catharsis is probably what we all need right now.
That said, it is quite vital that we see the play now, because the present—replete with lives on hold, on bankruptcy, on nervous bravery, or on the verge of lockdown madness—is its terrible, perfect currency. But while it does deal with contemporary travails in excruciating details, this is certainly not a realist play. In borrowing its staging from a wide variety of inspirations—from mime to Noh, from shadow play to Kuttiyatam—somehow the material feels elevated to a kind of modern mythology.
You can tell you are not seeing a regular play by how it opens: in the dimness of its performing space, four face-masked, white-faced figures congregate in the middle, all in a hush, all in a kind of trance, all attracted individually to low-key music, singular to them, which soon turn out to be varied, personalized ringtones from cellphones. Each clutches their own device like a leech, like how we all do in reality; each bump into each other; each regard the other with mistrust, and distance. And then they scurry to their specific spots onstage—with nary a dialogue—and the play begins.
That opening performance spiel in abstraction clues us in to how to embrace the play: everything is stylized, everything is pushed to a performative strangeness, and everything is metaphorical.
That could spell disaster in lesser hands. Often there is nothing as off-putting as material that spoon-feeds you earnestly with meaningful didacticism, especially when done in the bent of realism. But D Salag Collective, a new Dumaguete theatre company whose first full-length presentation is this play, is not a collective of “lesser hands.” Leading the group is Hope Tinambacan, the Hopia frontman, Bell Tower Project visionary, and YATTA stalwart, whose recent training at the Intercultural Theatre Institute [ITI] in Singapore—one of the most rigorous theatre programs in the world—has allowed him to shape, in collaboration with his fellow artists, a play that is beautifully performed, informed by Asian traditions of theatricality, with a gut punch for insights. Together with Nikki Cimafranca, Benjie Kitay, and Karen Silva, all co-directors, co-stars, and co-writers, and aided by a one-man stage crew, D Salag Collective invites us to consider carefully our current woes.
They do that by splintering the story into four vignettes that still somehow feel like parts of an organic whole, threaded together by a kind of a guide [played by Benjie Kitay] who fills the interludes with an earnest, audience-participatory yielding for time. Time eventually becomes one of the invisible antagonists of the play, but I’m getting ahead of myself. The coronavirus, too, is another one of the titular invisible antagonists—and Kitay’s guide also represents that, courtesy of a globular headdress that looks very much like the virus, with pencils, pens, cellphones, rulers, etc. in place of its spikes. That small piece of production design alone underlines so much what
Fighting the Invisible wants to tackle.
In the first vignette, a man in a black raincoat [played by Tinambacan] struts around in weariness, opening his garb to reveal assorted items—socks, cellphones, teddy bears, etc.—all price-tagged for sale. To a haunting guitar accompaniment, he mimes again and again the concerns and desperations of the present, a feel of temperature and heartbeat, a demonstration of dwindling resources, punctuated regularly with a plaintive plea, “Ayaw pud tawon, Lord.”
In the second vignette, a figure in a tent [played by Cimafranca], shadowplays our daily anxiety-ridden ritual of waking up to the pandemic, presaged by a sigh, “Kanus-a pa ni mahuman?” We see his silhouette go through getting up, dressing up, all the while mumbling one horrifying pandemic statistic after another. When he comes out of the tent, the revelation is both a surprise and a reckoning.
In the third vignette, a woman in an apron equipped with cleaning paraphernalia [played by Silva] goes about household chores—but in donning an office jacket over that apron, we get the slap of the farce: how our personal and professional lives have blurred in the lockdown, and how that uneasy blurring, Zoom meetings, and the still constant demands by our economic overlords to produce, produce, and produce eventually lead to breakdowns of our body, sanity, and spirit.
In the last vignette, our guide is joined by the three others [who provide both musical accompaniment and reflective Greek chorus] in a wrenching portrayal of anguished mental health wrought by the pandemic. This is my favorite vignette, because raw and real. There is something to be said about Kitay’s frenetic eyes as he rails against pandemic time that is both deliriously slow and excruciatingly fast at the same time: “Dili puwede mo pas-pas!” To which the chorus replies: “Unsay adlaw karon / Asa ko paingon? / Unsa akong unahon… / Kapa! Gakapa! / Kape! / Bugnaw nang kape. / Gabii pa man ni…” The anxiety is real.
It all feels so strong, and moving—because the play allows us to be somehow seen.
This is not the first play Dumaguete has seen since the pandemic started. Last 26 November 2020, Artista Sillimaniana put on an intimate, health protocol-following staging of Karen Schiff’s
Breakfast with Willy, starring Malka Shaver and Andrew Alvarez, and directed by Hannah Catacutan. It was a small comedy set in a grocery store, and its mirth and high jinx were what we needed in the dark depths of that uncertain year. A full year on, and with the end of the pandemic [hopefully] in sight, it’s time for our artists to take stock of our fragile recent past and still surging present, refracting our collective experience into a mirror of truth.
Cringe, laugh, cry—these are the measures of the catharsis we need. Fighting the Invisible paves the way.
Fighting the Invisible is slated on May 7, Friday and May 8, Saturday at 7 PM at the Sidlakang Negros Village Function Hall. Reserve a seat now at the D Salag Collective FB page. The production is limited to 40 seats per show. Safety protocols will be followed. A talkback session will follow after the show.
Photos by Renz Torres
Labels: art and culture, coronavirus, dumaguete, negros, theatre
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, May 05, 2021
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 71.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, May 02, 2021
5:32 AM |
I Should Be More Gentle with Myself
I should be more gentle with myself. I should stop beating myself down for not “doing enough.” I only just realized I’ve actually accomplished quite a lot this past week. Wrote two major essays and one art review, finished phase 1 of a project, sent out a book manuscript, proofread a short story due for publication in a major magazine, prepped a re-publication of another book in time for its 10th anniversary, and managed a very busy week for three entities in my social media management sideline. All these on top of battling crippling anxiety attacks and depression. I should be more gentle with myself, for my mental health’s sake Labels: life, mental health, work
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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