IN THE MIDDLE

Somewhere between afterimage and stark reality,
I bend back into my shadow
like a circle that is not yet,
reaching for the edge, an attempt to seal the rift
between my light and my dark.

The waking is not part of the dream
and yet, it is there, in that moment between--
the hollow that is seldom ever filled--
where they merge, two textures commingling:
so which the silk, then, and which the velvet?
Where does one end and the other begin?

I uncurl from the margins of my slumber
and stretch out into wakefulness. It is a violet dawn
that I see, floating in through the window.

I close my eyes once more, still
wafting in my memory of darkness.
Something had pulled me away from the embrace
of sleep, where it was night, where I felt safe.
What rippled the stillness?

A flickering, somewhere. A faint memory of light,
like the agony that uncertainty, now and then, becomes.

This is an excerpt from an unfinished story:

It was on a beach that they first met.

He preferred it to have been on a busy street or some squalid corner of the city, instead, to preclude picturesqueness from its recall. The crowd’s din or the stench of garbage would have made it seem less of a memory.

Instead, what he had with him, now, was the rhythmic sound of crashing waves as accompaniment. The undulating sea, the blanket of heaven, the sun-kissed trees, the warm sand: these formed the backdrop of his reminiscence of that first encounter. And in his mind, she would be there, etched against a blue sea and an even bluer sky, toes curling on the sand, looking at him.

His misery made the whole picture seem even more ephemeral.

Thinking, memory

Thinking does things to a person. It turns the mind into coils that, in turn, mesh into chaotic swirls that lead nowhere and, so it seems, have come from nowhere, too. And so you are driven into thinking even more, until you reach a place that’s precariously close to the brink; madness is there, lurking somewhere.

Memory is somewhat similar, but with a tamer air about it:

When the mind wants to remember, it gropes around for something to anchor itself on: a landscape, a scent, a face, a texture. A person afflicted with nostalgia, for example, finds himself probing into the recesses of his mind to trace the origin of an overwhelming smell of, say, roses, which has suddenly come upon him, one gray afternoon. He then follows it into traversing certain pathways. Along the way, he picks up images that interlace into a picture, even before this “trip” is over. A few steps before the final image, he suddenly thinks:
ah, yes, I remember.

Upon Seeing A Child Sleeping On A Pavement

Is it possible
We are more alone
than we think:

that the angels we were taught to call to
in our times of need are no less divine
than we ourselves are, that they could do no more
than walk on the same ground as we do,
that the wings we think they elevate us with
when we need lifting up
from our daily despondencies

are nothing more than creations
of our capricious minds, reasons
we come up with in our failure to put a finger
on the things we could not name,
that our superstitious minds
hook themselves on, for lack of a more tangible anchor

in the same way that we have coined the prayers
that we mumble as we look upwards to a heaven
that could just as well be no more than a blanket
of nothingness which our scientists have only just begun
to understand, a smallness
in one endless unknown,
the unknown itself a monstrous uncertainty
we would rather not come face to face with,

when the tv documentary we watched the other night
established the presence of blackholes
which could, at any point in time, swallow
our earth and, with it, the things we knew so well
and did not know, shatter
everything we had taught ourselves to believe,

could tear our unknowing, sleeping selves
into shreds and no angel would come to undo
such an undoing, no miracle to put the pieces
back into place?

From BLOGTHINGS

Hey, there! Try going to www.blogthings.com for some fun stuff. You could really get hooked, though. I can't believe I spent 2 hours in that website! Well, here are some of the things I found out about myself (some true, some not):

label: HOW'S YOUR INNER CHILD?
answer based on questionnaire: Your Inner Child Is Sad

You're a very sensitive soul.
You haven't grown that thick skin that most adults have.
Easily hurt, you tend to retreat to your comfort zone.
You don't let many people in - unless you've trusted them for a long time.

label: WHAT KIND OF FOOD ARE YOU?
answer based on questionnaire: You Are Chinese Food

Exotic yet ordinary.
People think they've had enough of you, but they're back for more in an hour. (mmm...)

label: WHAT'S YOUR PORN STAR NAME?
answer based on questionnaire: Your Porn Star Name Is...
Tight Cherry (haha!)

label: WHO'S YOUR CELEBRITY STYLE SISTER?answer based on questionnaire: Your Celebrity Style Twin is Mischa Barton (nice!)
Funky, bohemian, and girly.

label: WHAT TYPE OF WRITER SHOULD YOU BE?answer based on questionnaire: You Should Be A Poet (hah!)

You craft words well, in creative and unexpected ways.
And you have a great talent for evoking beautiful imagery...
Or describing the most intense heartbreak ever.
You're already naturally a poet, even if you've never written a poem

label: WHO SHOULD PAINT YOU?
answer based on questionnaire: Salvador Dali

You're a complex, intense creature who displays many layers.
There's no way a traditional portrait could ever capture you!

label: WHAT MYTHOLOGICAL CREATURE ARE YOU?
answer based on questionnaire: You Are a Mermaid (really?)

You are a total daydreamer, and people tend to think you're flakier than you actually are.
While your head is often in the clouds, you'll always come back to earth to help someone in need.
Beyond being a caring person, you are also very intelligent and rational.
You understand the connections of the universe better than almost anyone else.

So there. Try it, folks!

By The Way...

Janis Joplin was the eldest sister of Joni Mitchell and Aimee Mann.

Tori Amos and Sarah Mclachlan were their cousins, and Loreena McKennitt was the aunt everyone shunned and feared (but secretly respected).

And Carly Simon must be somewhere in their family tree.

This wouldn't really make sense in real life (the chronology wouldn't stand half a chance), but, hey, you do get my point.

Right?

Thanks!

Something from College

This is something I wrote for a FICTION class (under Luis Katigbak) reading journal blog.

Monday, August 09, 2004

Reading The Locked Room (from THE NEW YORK TRILOGY by Paul Auster)

I found the story very fast-paced. Perhaps the author’s knack for suspense had a lot to do with it. I felt myself drawn into the story once I started reading it (I couldn’t wait to get to the next pages) and, if not for pressing matters which I had to attend to, I think now that I would have finished it in one sitting. But that is entirely another story.
I found the premise extremely intriguing. Interesting would be the wrong word to describe it—it would be quite inadequate. The speaker’s obsession with Fanshawe was remarkable; so were the conflicting mixture of envy and admiration that the former had for the latter. I, myself, was fascinated by this kind of fascination. He felt these emotions quite intensely and this was conveyed with clarity in the text. It literally jumped from the pages to the reader’s perception. The man felt so strongly, and it showed.
Fanshawe was the quintessential angst-filled artist. He embodied the qualities of the deviant individual (redundant? I got carried away); so well tuned to his inner self that the rest of the world seemed—or was—abnormal for him. He very well knew that he couldn’t possibly bear to live in such a place; therefore, he ran away as much as he could, if little by little. In the end, he fulfilled this very strong need to ultimately run away from it all, under the guise of death. Yet it was also ironic that, for all the hiding he had done, and in spite of the disappearance he had staged for himself, his name and his writings had inevitably served to immortalize him. He had given away small bits of himself to the world he so shunned that in the end, he was never truly lost.
Sophie was the balance, the anchor to which the “I” could hold on in order for him not to completely lose sight of reality, the someone whom he could come back to after it all ended, the reason for him to come back at all. As I saw it, he did become a little mad in his pursuit of Fanshawe; when he felt that, in his desperate search for this person, he was actually the one being hunted down.
When I think about it, there was something spooky about the entire thing, something sinister. I wouldn’t go so far as to put the story under the horror category, but I have to say that there were certain parts in the story that sent shivers down my spine, pardon the hackneyed expression.


posted by chansonata 11:35 AM

Aimee Mann Wishes She Had a River She Could Skate Away on...

Joni Mitchell must be the elder, milder-in-temperament sister of Aimee Mann.

If I were to put their portraits side-by-side, they would both be smiling: Joni Mitchell's would be wistful and Aimee Mann's would be sarcastic. But both smiles will be sad, that I'm quite sure of. Both will have a look of (faintly feigned) smugness about them--hey, they've both been there (wherever or whatever that may be), but Joni has emerged wise, knowing she's alive and has to make the best of things, anyway; while Aimee came out angry, struggling against her walls, realizing she's alive and that she has to live with it, anyway.

And so they wrote songs, and these songs were things they've said to each other, long, lonely conversations they've had on those nights when they held vigils under a watchful moon, or on those grey afternoons when there was nothing one could do but to keep one's mind company. They must've had grand times, laughing at the rest of the world because they knew that they knew more than the others did. But they must have argued, as well, oh yes, 'cause one of them was angry, don't forget, and one of them, wise. I'd like to think that it was Joni who usually won, but Aimee wouldn't have given up without putting up a fight. It didn't matter that she realized Joni was right, after all. It just wasn't in her to show that she agreed.

Some reviews from my previous blog:


February 13, 2007
Lit Geek Update #1

Last book I read: Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami- Poignant without the pathos; in this book, Murakami deviates from his trademark "strangeness." No elephant vanishes here, no dancing dwarf, no man-sheep-- just real people whose paths intersect and whose lives intertwine, a coming -of-age story set in 60's Japan, in the era of the Beatles, of Carole King and The Doors. No Murakami creation would be complete without references to Music (see sentence before this one) and Literature-- here he mentions Dostoyevsky, and has the main protagonist declaring admiration for Jay Gatsby. An emotional read. Too many suicides, though.
What I'm reading now: Tomcat In Love by Tim O'Brien


April 01, 2007
Lit Geek Update #2

Last Book I read: Tomcat In Love by Tim O'Brien- If you liked Nabokov's Lolita, you're gonna love this one. Not that there's any similarity between the plots, though, just in the delivery. The genius who wrote the unforgettable The Things They Carried strikes again, this time in a hilarious story of the thwarted obsession and madness of one Thomas H. Chippering, a self-proclaimed war hero and "sex-magnet," whose attempts at honesty and transparency make it hard for the reader to guess just exactly when he is telling the truth, and when he is not. This ambivalence will keep you glued on the book and give you the itch to go to the next page! The main character made me shake my head and laugh out loud in turns, and the other people in the novel made me realize, with grudging agreement, just how dysfunctional this world of ours could get (or the people in it, at least).
What I'm Reading Now: The WInd-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami


May 16, 2007
Lit Geek Update #3

Last book I read: Over A Cup of Ginger Tea by Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo- Reading this book meant being reunited not only with one of my favorite Filipino writers, Cristina pantoja Hidalgo, but re-encountering some of my best-loved pieces by Filipino women writers, as well. In example: the venerable Gilda Cordero Fernando's fairy tales like "The Dust Monster," "The Level of Each day's Need" and "High Fashion." The piece that I liked most, though, was the part entitled "Rewriting The War," wherein Hidalgo discussed some noteworthy women's experiences during the Japanese war (these entries--most of them from diaries and unpublished memoirs--compiled into books only recently). These harrowing tales, as told from the perspective, not of the men who fought in the frontlines, but of the women who were staging a different kind of battle, that of trying desperately--but with much determination and resilience--to fight for survival, to glue together the pieces shattered by the war and its atrocities, make for eye-opening reads, pieces from which we have a lot to learn, and which will further elucidate our views on the Japanese occupation and the horrors that came with it. Towards the end of the piece, Hidalgo quoted Brenda K. Marshall on Foucault: History then, in Foucault's terms may become "counter memory": the process of reading history against the grain, of taking an acknowledged active role in the interpretation of history rather than a passive, viewing role. Counter-memory intervenes in history rather than chronicles it.(1992, 140). And this is precisely what these women have done with their war memoirs: they have gone past looking at the war with just their stares, their senses. They have taken the extra step to intervene, to re-write it for the sake of changing history and transforming our perceptions, not with the might of weapons, but with the beauty, the honesty and candor of their words, their truths.
What I'm reading now: A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce


Lit Geek Update # 4

Last book I read: Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson- I saw this book at the South Mall branch of Book Sale and I grabbed it even if I had only the faintest idea of who the author was (I vaguely remembered my professor mentioning her name in our Erotic Writing class back in college). The title was an arresting one, as well. True to the words on the cover, the pages did have a lot to say a lot about the body, but not just the body, superficially. It was also about the complexity of human relationships, the richness of the senses, and the sparks of chemistry that go through the skin, the muscles, the sinews and the bones when two people touch and discover each other through all these passages. The story is told from the first person point of view, transitioning from speaking to a particular "you" to addressing the reader (who could just as well be the "you" in every "you and me"). The language is lush, sensual, powerful. One particular thing that I liked about it is that the story spoke to me. The words seemed to be reaching out from the pages to my consciousness and memory. It is a book that I know I will keep coming back to, over and over, if only for the truths in its pages and the lack of pretense in the telling.
What I'm reading now: The Journals of Sylvia Plath; Ted Hughes and Frances McCullough, editors- this book will most probably screw up my head even more, but what the hell. Sylvia Plath is just something else.

It happens, sometimes

that I find myself

dead

and hear only the scraping

of spade against smoothed brick,

feel only the grainy sand

thrown shovelful after another

now and then

a strange softness

a bloom wilting

under the coarse heaviness

of solid things

like consciousness.

I wrote this for a poetry class:

CHAIR

Empty now, the chair

sits obdurate

against the wall.

Its carved, drooping arms--

gnarled as the fingers

that once clutched at them

while grappling with tricks

played by faltering memory--

are sepia colored: stained by time,

and splotched with age.

Faintly streaking the beaten legs

are flecks of mahogany:

remnants of its youth,

traces of its prime

when tots would sit on its lap

and know comfort

in the magenta, paisley-print cushion--

now paled into a sad, vague, rose (like a faded dream),

intricate design long gone;

torn around edges,

a few seams clawing at the seat,

pressing,

holding on.

In a dusky corner, the chair lingers

stiffly struggling to remain

straight on its back

like an old, old woman straining

for strength.

No need for a title (or: Do they sell these lines anywhere?)

The weird thing about getting what you want (and want so badly) is that there's always something else you have to give up. You have to let go of one thing, to make room for another. We are never completely happy, and it makes us even unhappier when we try to come up with ways to be happy. (Hmm. Three HAPPYs there, in the last sentence).
Why am I so fond of parenthetical statements? A few years back at a poetry class, one of my poems was on the hot seat and my professor, poet and scholar Chingbee Cruz (her first book is out, by the way), commented that I had a penchant for asides (in parentheses) and that I liked to quantify things. Why is this? she asked (all I could give for an answer was a shrug).
Yeah, yeah. I know I didn't have to enclose the last sentence in parentheses. But what the heck.
There's something so cute (and quirky) about smugness and sarcasm enclosed between two parallel lines curving toward each other (look closely-- don't they seem STILL moving closer together?) CLOSELY and CLOSER. (Hmm. Same root words.)
Just a curious question: Why in the world would a band call themselves DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE? (If there's anyone out there who can give me an answer, please raise your hand. Thanks.)
I started this entry with a somber tone, and I had every intention of sustaining the seriousness to the end. But somehow, I shifted, somewhere along the way (or somewhere in the FIRST paragraph, would you believe it was THAT early).
I jumped.
Yeah, I did. (Try it, it's nice.)
It seemed trite to continue in the way I began. I mean, happiness? How many people have written about finding JOY and FULFILLMENT (did I spell that right?) and CONTENTMENT and all those BIG words pointing at approximately the same meaning that we all keep hoping would turn into something tangible, but remain abstract, anyway? (Long sentence, that one.) We turn ourselves upside-down, and our minds inside-out, and still, we remain just about right, somewhere. And that makes us restless, makes us wonder: is this all there is to it? (Am I back at where I started?)

LAUGHING GAS

There will almost always be darkness
as you'll be forced to shut your eyes tight
like how it is when soap gets in them
only without the pain
but is it pleasure or pathos
you cannot tell
not with the numbness
spreading like despair
kneadingyour consciousness into pliancy
or is it hardness

and soon they come
first in ripples the giggles
then in waves the laughter
howling from out of you
uncontrollable

it's best to be in bed
you might fall if you're not
and best not to be alone
you might never rise up
from the stupor you fall into
when the hysterics die down
because the cloud that you're in
does seem real
but it's not
only what it is
a cloud
that is all
yes you know
the best part of being sober
is remembering how it was when you were drunk
if only you could.

(Written last December 3, 2006)

STONE

The smoke from my cigarette rises to the glass table top, forming rings of grey, undulating into bigger circles, centripetal waves, ephemeral, disappearing into the waft of a sibilant breeze, reminding me that I can, must, blink or else I'll turn into stone.
Stone. Booker Prize-winning author A.S. Byatt has, in her Little Black Book of Stories, a short story called "The Stone Woman," which is an understatedly poignant tale of a woman whose grief turns her into stone. Jade, Agate, emerald, lapiz lazuli, ruby, diamond, quartz... How beautiful she must have looked, what splendor, how glorious it must have been to be something entirely different from, or, to be only an image of, what one used to be; to sense nothing, feel nothing, be nothing.
To be stone and not be. To not be anything but stone.
I have long ago taught myself, little by little, to close myself into a bud whenever I feel the threat of pain. People have called me hard-headed, stoic, cruel, stone-hearted. I have been misunderstood as being unfeeling. Heartless, even.
It's a trick, you see.
Consider: a fist clenching into itself; a dancer curling her body into an imperfect, human (but, perhaps I am being redundant) circle; a hand gripping an object it does not want to let go of.
Pain or no, turning oneself into stone is a skill that can be learned, an art that can be perfected. Grief is an unnecessary catalyst when one has mastered this craft. Because it is a craft that one has to go back to learning again, and again, if one is to be an expert at it.
I am slowly getting there. Just a few more polishes, and I will be the stone-woman I have always wanted to be.
For now, though, I must remember to blink. For now.

This is the Rilke I fell in love with, the poem that led me to search for his The Sonnets To Orpheus and buy it, no matter what the cost:

You Who Never Arrived

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house-- , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced
upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...

From 'Ahead of All Parting:The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke'
Edited and Translated by Stephen Mitchell

in my mind i curl myself

into a tight little
ball
a fist clenched angry,
tight

but you become
a multitude of red ants
crawling all over
me

goading, forcing me
to uncurl

Once I Browsed

Consider the contrast between these two journal entries:

May 18, 2004
I do not remember exactly when my fixation with twilight began. The waning light of day and the lowered tone of the wind have such cathartic effects on me. It is perhaps my brooding nature and melancholic proclivities that find an affinity with this time of day, when everything mellows down to a quietness which calms even the most fiery of souls. The equilibrium between light and dark fills me with a sense of reflection. Dusk finds me in my most pensive state.

July 20, 2005
The rain is falling and it is awfully dark outside. It’s two fortyin the afternoon and yet it seems like twilight. There is a congruence to the words twilight and gloom.
Loneliness is a terrible thing. It makes the soul shrink unto itself, like there’s nowhere else to go except inwards, and one does not know what one will find there. Lonely. There is a sense of finality in the letters, as if there is nothing in between them, not even shadows. Just nothing.
Nothing.
The word sadness is altogether different. It seems incredibly mundane, when placed beside loneliness. Sadness is something temporary, like a thunderstorm on a summer’s day; one is sure it will go away, even as one basks in the middle of it.
But loneliness. It is twilight, and then the darkness that comes after twilight. It goes away, but is certain to come back. Daylight obscures it, but only for so long.
It is part of, if not the, landscape.
Loneliness, I have to confess, has become one of my favorite words.

On Maria Callas

Listening to Maria Callas sing is a pleasure one has to experience in order to believe. That there is a sensation as intense as the kind that her voice is able to draw, is as amazing a discovery as the knowledge that all this is as concrete, as human, as a pinch on one’s palm.
In “La Mamma Morta”, one can practically feel the misery emanating from the voice. This is not to say that I understand the lyrics—I don’t even pretend to—because I don’t. But the tension just about seizes you, and tightly; the voice unravels the story whose words, in turn, seem to crawl into your skin and, deeper, permeate your being like some unseen spirit. The potency in the voice—and the effect of this—can be described as superhuman and yet, ultimately, its greatest achievement is that it is able to touch the core of one’s humanity, to stir dormant feelings of sadness, whose cause one can’t seem to trace, exactly. It is, I believe, the primeval sense of loneliness that lives in each of us, and it is this that “La Mamma Morta” gropes around for, and then raises for us to see, if not to acknowledge.
It is, however, the kind of song that gradually grows on you. Listening to it for the first time is less an emotional experience than an aesthetic one. Initially, what strikes one is Maria Callas’ superbly trained voice, the artistry in her technique, the flawless rendition, her mastery of her craft.
This mastery can just as adequately be illustrated by her version of “Queen of the Night” which is from Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. It is in stark contrast to “La Mamma Morta,” the former being immensely lighter (though not in vocal difficulty) in mood than the latter. When I heard “Queen of the Night” for the first time, one of my lingering thoughts was that this amazing soprano had, herself, become the magic flute.

Luis Katigbak, On Music

You find your music like you find anything you love for a lifetime: through head-spinningly intense first impressions, deepened by increments, by glances and tastes, flashes of bliss, the slow rush, the terrifying exhilaration of knowing and being known, and finally: hands and heart clasped in commitment, days and years sealed against decay. The beauty of a cascading guitar line, of a voice in flight singing words that mean something to you--these are permanent and ephemeral, as are everything that matters, and when you first fall for your music you almost never appreciate the paradox.

from "The Dawn: Everything that Matters",by Luis Katigbak,PULP, March 2005

Parting

Your lids fold like sails, noiseless
and I know you have left me
where I could not follow
your breathing steady, rising
and falling, waves
in rhythm with my heartbeat
the sibilant sound hissing,
filling my ears
with silence
louder now, and painful

like sorrow washing ashore.

My corner of the bed seems wider now,
and I become my sadness.
I spill over, across,
above myself
until I drown
in my nothingness.

Or was it you who did?
Was it you?