Words

by Dana Gioia

The world does not need words. It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other--
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper--
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always--
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

please someone put a title to this

Whatever rocks your boat, beautiful, do it before they tell you not to. Everybody says don't as the song goes but few people I know actually know that song and fewer still like that song, or could sing to that song. My mind feels light as air or something similar to air and I really should be fumbling for a pillow to lay my head on. I've been complaining about not having had enough sleep and now the words come out of my fingers as if they were gushing out and I am not aware what sentence I am in or if what I am writing is still a sentence and it should be good to let go at times but there is still that --that-- I can't find the darn word oh yeah, that neurotic compulsion--even when one is afloat--to look back and check if the sentence is still following its proper thread or if the punctuation is correct but at this point it'll be too far behind to look back and really see what one has gone through as there are things that we, even with the utmost earnestness at bringing back we can no longer bring back, or change, or wipe clean no matter how we try to wipe things clean they remain stained or tainted with something what that something is we could not put our finger on or even think of naming because our mouths have run out of names to give to the things we see and hear and touch and cannot we drift along like words falling from the mind to the page, in streams sometimes in drops when the mind draws blank after blank after blank.

And what do you know of my griefs?

Broadway Frenzy via YouTube

Some lasting impressions:

1. Bernadette Peters has this amazing performance of "Being Alive" from Sondheim's Company at the "Hey, Mr. Producer" concert. She is one feisty redhead! Click here to watch.

2. Robert Cuccioli is hysterically wonderful as Dr. Jekyll/Mr Hyde in Jekyll and Hyde. Click here for his moment in "This is the Moment."

3. Lea Salonga awes as Fantine in Les Miserables. Is there anything this girl cannot do? Watch her here.

4. I love this clip of Mandy Patinkin singing "Children Will Listen" from Into The Woods. Here, he sings a medley of "Loving You" from Passion and one of my all-time favorite Broadway songs "If I Loved You" from Carousel.

5. In this clip, Michael Ball sings "I Only Want To Say" from Jesus Christ Superstar with such aplomb that I played it over and over when I bought the Andrew Lloyd Webber 50th Birthday Concert DVD. Il est magnifique!

6. Michele Marsh, as Hodel, sings "Far From the Home I Love," perhaps one of the saddest songs from The Fiddler on the Roof. And, of course, "Matchmaker"!

7. I read somewhere that Vanessa Redgrave, by far, overshadowed Julie Andrews in the Guinevere role (Camelot) and I couldn't agree more. In "The Lusty Month of May" and "Take Me To The Fair," she delights as the slightly bored, inwardly playful, scheming, perpetually singing queen.

8. Here, Lea sings the Gershwins' "Someone To Watch Over Me" from Crazy For You in a beautifully laid-back way. And, without a doubt, here is the most beautiful version of "I've Never Been in Love Before" (from Guys and Dolls) I have ever heard.

I could go on and on.

Some other time, perhaps.
=)

I want to read

this:

this:

and this:

So let me try to change the way I look at the rain and, perhaps, I'd find something else in it...

Does the rain in Paris speak French?

Yeah, I know, it's a stupid question.

Oh, well.

photo from A Cup of Jo.

More on the Weather:

Dear, dear me, been getting headaches because of this confused, temperamental weather. Been lazy and cranky and blah and it doesn't help that work has not been a slide down the rainbow lately.

One bright spot to my week is that my dad and brother were in the city for a few days and the kids and I got to spend time with them, roaming Glorietta (which has become a dismal disappointment) and Greenbelt (which is gorgeous, thank you).

Other than that, I've been trying to assuage my weather woes with as much good music as I could get my hands into: lots of India Arie, Carrie Underwood, some Broadway, Christina Aguilera (tried her "Walk Away" and "Save Me From Myself" upon a friend's recommendation), and good ol' Ella Fitzgerald.

Several friends are in La Union for some surfing and I kinda feel a tiny pang of regret that I didn't go with them--even if they had tried to cajole me into it, like tens of times--though, at the same time, these rains would've taken away whatever fun I would have had if I'd gone.

There, you see, the weather has got me all confused, too!

What are you doing to keep dry and sane?
=)

Unsaid

So much of what we live goes on inside–
the diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches
of unacknowledged love are no less real
for having passed unsaid. What we conceal
is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.

by Dana Gioia
(found at Jonathan Carroll's blog)

Rain

Another gray day.

The rain falls in an incessant, stubborn rhythm and there's a muffled wailing that accompanies it. After weeks of glaring, yellow mornings and sticky, orange afternoons, this wet grayness is, surprisingly, an unwelcome foil to what is supposed to be the dry season. And in as much as I abhor the heat, I would have wanted a less sudden transition.

If, indeed, we are shifting into the rainy season.

Isn't it a little too early for that, though? Or, perhaps, I am merely letting myself drown in the despondency that hit me unawares this morning, the usual way it catches me when it comes.

The Sky's Mood Swings--and So Does Mine (?)

What's with the shift in the weather's tone?

Suddenly, it's raining (and raining hard!) in the middle of what is supposed to be--and what has promised to be--an excruciatingly hot April.

I overheard someone ask: is it the end of summer?

And, despite my cranky take on the heat, I found myself thinking: I hope not.

I mean, summer ain't all that bad, right?

Tee-hee.

Let's Talk

A and I have been "talking" via our blogs, she having written a post about what she would tell her 16-year-old self should they get the opportunity to have a conversation. Tough chance, I know, but still, it's a whimsical and very pretty thought.

This got me thinking about my 16-year-old self and here I am, trying to think up things I'd say to her should we ever have the chance to meet.

I'd probably tell her:

1. to take her writing post at the school paper more seriously;
2. to study, study, study, especially the Math lessons she'd taken for granted for so long;
3. to quit whining about the trivial, frivolous so-called "problems" she's facing daily--there's much, much more to come and she'd better save those tears for when they'd really need to be shed;
4. to listen to her mom and dad--they're right, most of the time, didn't she know that?
5. to go out some more and not confine herself to her room, much like the hermit that she was;
6. to smile more, laugh more;
7. to throw away those over-sized shirts and start buying girly tops;
8. to sing, sing, sing;
9. eat all the 3M palabok she can possibly eat because she's gonna miss it horribly when she's older and far, far from home; and
10. to stay a child for as long as she could because adulthood will last ever so much longer and by then it'll be too late to regret not having stayed a kid when she had the chance to.

She probably wouldn't listen, though. She'd be too far away, too caught up in her stubborn little shell of adolescence.

She's one to dig her heels pa naman.
Hay.

Lit Geek Update #14: Kafka, Funny?

I mean, the thought of Kafka as funny never, ever occurred to me, in all my readings of him. I pored through his stories with unabashed earnestness, approaching them with utmost thoughtfulness. Man's essential solitude and loneliness have been his central themes, all throughout, have they not?

I--and most of us, I'd presume--would turn out to be mistaken, apparently. In the initial paragraphs of "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness," the third essay from David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster And Other Essays:, he writes:

"...it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny. Nor to appreciate the way funniness is bound up with the power of his stories." -p. 61-

And I spent more than half an hour mulling over these lines:

"No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home." -p. 64-

I rearranged the ideas in several different ways, tried to twist the logic to see if it would give, caught a headache in the process, finally decided I'd had enough, then went back to it with a firm resolve not to give up until I could roll the words of the simplest paraphrase in my tongue as comfortably as I can. Eventually, and thankfully, I succeeded.

What a feat!

And then I read the passage to a friend, asked him to turn the lines around his head, then tell me what he thought about it.

I'm guessing he went through the same thing I did.
=)

Wallace ends the essay with these superb lines:

"You can ask them to imagine his stories as all about a kind of door. To envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens...and it opens outward--we've been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch." -p.65-

Counting the Days...

Release date: May 19, 2009

Summer Whining From the Sun-Hater

Hah!

Oh, yes, folks, time to welcome the sweltering heat again.

It's that time of the year when electric bills skyrocket to alarming heights because of A/C and electric fan abuse (Christmas is another thing, what with the lights and all, but I think most of us have come to our senses and realized that decking our homes in ridiculously numerous colored lights is just not worth it); when the A/Cs and fans themselves conk out from over-use; when wet bodies frolic in the beach and under the sun, tanning and burning in reckless abandon, mindless of the premature aging the precious skin is put under; when tempers flare with the hot, dry winds (are there any winds, by the way?).

Poof, I was never really a summer person, never one to get all giddy to go to the beach and laugh and grin and toast like there's no tomorrow. The most I'd do there--if some really persistent friend would ever succeed in convincing me to go, in the first place--is to lather up on tons and tons of sunscreen, put on a nice pair of shades, find a really shady corner under some really leafy coconut tree (a bunch of coconut trees would be best--the more shade there is, the better), stack up on two good books, or three, sit on a thick, dark blue towel and curl my toes in the sand. Worse, I'd probably fall asleep, willing myself to wake up only when it's 6 pm, when the scorching heat would already have simmered a bit.

For all that I am a Pisces, I'm really a goldfish in a fishbowl, happy to swim in my own little space, where the waters are tranquil, and where I am safe.

And where there's no premature skin aging happening.

Party-pooper, you might say. And missing a lot, or something to that effect.

Whatever.

"Beautiful Flower" (India Arie)

This is a song for every girl who's
Ever been through something
She thought she couldn't make it through, yeah
I sing these words because I was that girl, too
Wanting something better than this
But who do I turn to?

Now we're moving from the darkness into the light
This is the defining moment of our lives

Cause you're beautiful like a flower
More valuable than a diamond
You are powerful like a fire
You can heal the world with your mind and
There is nothing in the world that you cannot do
When you believe in you
Who are beautiful (yeah you)
Who are brilliant (yeah you)
Who are powerful (yeah you)
Who are resilient

This is a song for every girl who
Feels that she is not special
Cause she don't look like a supermodel Coke bottle
The next time the radio tells you
To shake your money-maker
Shake your head and tell them
Tell them you're a leader

Now we're moving from the darkness into the light
This is the defining moment of our lives

This song is for you (Yeah you)
This song is for you (Yeah you)
This song is for you (Yeah you)
Yeah you
You are brilliant...



video from youtube.

Mulling Over My Week

My dad sent me a text message this afternoon, asking me what I did during the Holy Week and it got me thinking: what did I do this Holy Week?

It occurs to me that without having mapped out anything in particular, things simply conspired to provide me the "air" I needed for the culmination of Lent, namely: I came across "Jesus of Nazareth" while channel-surfing yesterday (Holy Friday) and decided to watch it (what remained of the 6-hour film, anyway), finding myself involuntarily reflecting on the world's current religious/spiritual state and, inevitably, leading me to ponder my current spiritual state;

and this morning, I finished reading Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, which is a seemingly tongue-in-cheek story told for laughs, but from which we just might get the reflections we seek in the other, more serious books of our faith and could not seem to find. Now, I started reading this book a few weeks ago, with no thought, at all, of the Holy Week and it strikes me as significant--even strangely calculated--that I should get to the final chapters (where the Christ's passion is relayed) during Holy Friday, and finish the book by Black Saturday.

Below are some lines in the afterword that had me musing:

"This story is not and was never meant to challenge anyone's faith; however, if one's faith can be shaken by stories in a humorous novel, one may have a bit more praying to do." -p. 443-

Tomorrow, Easter comes. I wonder what'll be in store for me, then, and thereafter.

Found:

Sasha Frere-Jones contemplates the timelessness of U2's music in this New Yorker post.

Some interesting bits:

"The band’s first (but not its sole) legacy is its sound, easily identified within a few bars: a high, chiming guitar figure, usually simple in structure but fleshed out by the ringing of open strings and the doubling effect of a delay unit; a charging, near-military beat and bass line stretched out with a little extra swing; and singing that is defiant and loud and slightly weird."

and:

"Yes, the band’s most famous member is the least technically gifted, and the most influential, the guitarist David Evans, a.k.a. the Edge, is the least likely to pipe up in public."

Her article further cements my belief that the band's detractors are wrong to judge “No Line on the Horizon” the way they are doing. Hmp.

(photo from TheNewYorker.com)

Lit Geek Update #13

I'm so lovin' this book! Funny funny funny!



For the easily offended, though, read at your own risk!

From Rilke:

Lingering, even among what's most intimate,
is not our option.

***

...Here falling
is our best. From the mastered emotion
we fall over into the half-sensed, onward and onward.

***

Only you
drift like the moon. And down below, your nocturnal
landscape grows bright and darkens--

-from "To Holderlin"-

My shy moonshadow would like to speak
with my sunshadow from far away
in the language of fools;

-Muzot, mid-February 1922-

from Uncollected Poems

Lit Geek Update #12

Here, Virginia Woolf writes, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is going to write."

Shakespeare's sister must've had severe clinical depression, tsk, tsk.

If he had a sister.

Re-read the book over a cup of Starbucks' tall mocha latte with an extra shot of espresso. One thing about Woolf's writings is that one reading is never enough. I must've read Mrs. Dalloway thrice and I still feel it's not enough.

Rachel Getting Married

I am not well-versed in matters about film and I've only recently discovered that Jonathan Demme was the director of "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Philadelphia". This piece of information made me go, "hmm..."

I felt embarrassed because despite a friend's recommendation that I watch it, I had shrugged "Rachel Getting Married" off as a chick flick just because Anne Hathaway was in it (such a stupid conclusion, I know). I ate my words, yes, and, along with them, several huge, painful lumps of emotion.

I did not at all feel that my intelligence was being insulted--the movie made me think and ask questions, one after another. Its raw depiction of reality, and all the ugliness and pain that comes with it, at times became too much for me, but perhaps that is where it succeeds most. The script is superb (Jenny Lumet did a wonderful job) in that it is devoid of sugar and sap, yet--and perhaps owing to that--the movie hit home, right where it should.

Being the opinionated, thinking human being that I was, I empathized with the main character so much to the point of hating almost everyone else in the film. The thought of depressed people being judged by other people depressed me to almost below zero (or zero, then, alright). But then again, with the movie climaxing, and my emotion-blinded brain clearing up, I realized, hey, depression isn't--and will unlikely be--a low-hanging fruit that anyone could just reach out for and put in the palm of one's hand as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. Very few people would recognize it for what it is, least of all acknowledge that they are afflicted with it, so expecting the sane to understand would be like telling someone to chew on broken glass and expecting them to do it.

Whew.

This movie hit me hard. I'd recommend a hankie, or a pack of tissue, should you decide to give it a try. They just might come in handy.

=)

Lines

Let me erase the word
before the final letter
falls on the page.

You refuse to speak
so let me
be mute with you.

If the upturned palm cannot hold more than what it could give
what right has it to ask for more?

So I will close my hands
and keep them so

folded
dove wings.

Haircut

Finally, some time to breathe.




The past couple of weeks had me waiting in the wings to exhale. The excitement from the tension and pressure at work had built up to an alarming crescendo and it felt like I was holding my breath the whole time. So, this afternoon, I went to trusty old David's for a much deserved (and long delayed) haircut. This was partly brought about by my thwarted attempt to purchase something nice and pretty for myself--I searched the shops in vain but found nothing to my fancy, so a trim seemed like a good detour with which to channel my frustration--and partly by the ball and chain that my heavy mop of long, unruly locks had become.

Now, dark circles around the eyes would disappear with careful dabs of concealer, but split-ends are an entirely different matter. My extremely dry, frizzy and very long hair had become the telltale sign of the tremendous stress in the workplace and no amount of conditioner could mask the miserable tangles they had meshed themselves into.

I think the haircut did wonders.

My head feels pounds lighter, my mind a little less clouded.