Face Paint!

Only your real friends will tell you when your face is dirty.  

- Sicilian Proverb

Take-home quote for the day:

"Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies. It wanders perturbedly through the halls and galleries of the memory, and is often heard again, distinct and living as when it first displaced the wavelets of the air. "
-Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton, 1803-1873
English politician, poet, playwright, and novelist

from the weekend couch:

Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999

Songs of the self

"…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her food and drink too--and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew…." 
— A.S. Byatt, Possession


This morning, not by chance, at all, I unearthed my old copy of Songs of Ourselves: Writings by Filipino Women in English (edited by Edna Zapanta Manlapaz) and spent a good hour and a half browsing through its pages. On the upper left hand of the flyleaf, I had, with a red pen, written my name and, in blue ink, "1998". Whew, such a long time ago. I was 18, then, just beginning to adjust to life far, far from home, and to English Major-hood in the UP. I had bought the book at the Katips branch of National, hell-bent on making up for the time I had lost in Grade School and High School, being confined to reading Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson, stuck in the time and literature of Shakespeare and Keats, thinking that Robert Burns's "A Red Red Rose" was the end-all and be-all of poetry. I seethed, a little angry at my former English teachers for keeping Angela Manalang Gloria, et al, from my sphere of consciousness. Oh, that there were lines as beautiful as

They tried in vain 
to understand how one so carved from pride
and glassed in dream could have so flung aside
her graven days
(from "Soledad", Angela Manalang Gloria)


or

she concentrates upon the rosebuds

of the china, hoping, hoping

they would break.

-Merlinda Bobis, "Dinner in Progress"

and that Ophelia Alcantara Dimalanta and Gilda Cordero Fernando had been, and still were, churning out wonderful works of poetry and fiction--I tried to devour as much of their, and other Filipino writers', works, as I can. I was hungry and eager and greedy for understanding, and the book's pages bore the marks: underlined passages, marginal notes written in pencil, my alacrity showing in the slits of what should have been O's, the pointy L's, the exclamation points after the comments. Some examples:

as if by burning the clothes, she could also burn/ kill the memory of Pedro's dead wife ("The Small Key", Paz Latorena)

the controversial poem, Commonwealth Awards ("Revolt From Hymen", Angela Manalang Gloria)

work of a genius, as expected ("Paradox", Angela Manalang Gloria)

love this! so amazing! ("Speck of Rain Roaring", Edith Tiempo)

the failure/ inability to grieve; to acknowledge the loss as such ("Behind the Fern", Rowena Tiempo-Torrevillas)

this is foreshadowed by the preceding stanzas; still, it is jolting enough./ suspicion; stirrings of rebellion/ protest --very mild; still inchoate ("Tribeswoman", Marra Pl. Lanot)

this is so nice! poignant, really, without being glaringly so. very subtle. ("Dinner in Progress", Merlinda Bobis)

Yes, yes, you can tell that literary criticism was not one of my strengths when I was a student (and it still isn't, by the way, and I don't think it will ever be), but coming upon these small, candid lines is a precious experience for me, mainly because these scraps of observation remind me of a time when I was wide-eyed and ardent, bringing back that all too familiar longing to drown myself in lines and whole texts, that itch to fish for words and play with them on blanks and spaces, the incomparable high of being in a roomful of people who understand what it's like to be hungry that way. Instead, I'm stuck in a daily grind of facts and statistical analysis and numerical figures, where people think that Dan Brown and Paulo Coelho write literature.

Still, I keep the faith and continue to make time for cherished moments like this: stolen and swift, and all the more precious because they are so.

Breakfast at Tiffany's Final Scene

Moon River - Breakfast at Tiffany's

Daylight.

I used to tell you my dreams.
- Louise Gluck, "Siren"

These short, sudden silences, in syncopation with each other, like the miscalculation of tears, and, in between, the small pauses. The words, spread across spaces, as mute, as immobile, as the reach of this depleted while. The sky dissolves the moon, and the stars slip away, like nights often do. And because everything melts into everything else, we lose the moon. Soon, that gush of sunlight, bathing the sylph-like vagueness in clarity and certainty, revealing the gaps, the hideousness, in things.

Fluorescence, fizzling, flimsy, faint, fade, futile, forsake, forget.

Found:

My traipses into Jonathan Carroll's blog almost always yield loots of beautiful snippets. This morning, I found this there and it just really hit right home:

The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person - without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other. 

- Osho


Is that beautiful, or what?

May the Holy Week hold for us all a time for reflection.
Peace be with you.

THINGS SHOULDN'T BE SO HARD by Kay Ryan

A life should leave
deep tracks:
ruts where she
went out and back
to get the mail
or move the hose
around the yard;
where she used to
stand before the sink,
a worn-out place;
beneath her hand
the china knobs
rubbed down to
white pastilles;
the switch she
used to feel for
in the dark
almost erased.
Her things should
keep her marks.
The passage
of a life should show;
it should abrade.
And when life stops,
a certain space—
however small —
should be left scarred
by the grand and
damaging parade.
Things shouldn't
be so hard.

*Kay Ryan won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book The Best of It: New and Selected Poems by Kay Ryan (Grove/Atlantic)

And then, there's Estella

"...life is made of ever so many partings welded together."

'So,' said Estella, 'I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.' 

"The unqualified truth is, that when I loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Once for all; I loved her nonetheless because I knew it, and it had no more influence in restraining me, than if I had devoutly believed her to be human perfection."

"I never had one hour's happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death."

- Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

Stowaway Holly:

"I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together.  I'm not quite sure where that is just yet. "

"Never love a wild thing.... If you let yourself love a wild thing,  you'll end up looking at the sky."

So, it's Argentina for Ms. Golightly.
I'm definitely adding her to my list of favorite girls.

quotes are from Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's

Rest Day

"And today is whatever I want it to mean."
- Beth Orton, "Central Reservation"


If my eyes are to be trusted, I'd say it was a full and orange moon I saw in the sky, early this evening. The wind was benign, not biting, at all, just all coltish and balmy, bringing memories of violins and vanilla. Beth Orton was in the background, and Miles Davis followed suit with his trumpet and his band. The lines of a just-read poem still floated in my head and I breathed it all in: the aftermaths of twilight, the cool scent of the evening, the loveliness of beat and song, the exquisiteness of words and spaces, the lucid state my mind was in.

I had my music and my sanity. Everything was in its right place.

So much loveliness here...

What are regrets?
They're just lessons we haven't learned yet
It's like catching snow on your tongue
You can't pin this butterfly down
Can't pin this butterfly down..


Another day draws away
And my heart sinks with the sun

Sana - Up Dharma Down

Paulit-ulit-ulit-ulit kong pinakikinggan ang kantang ito. Tapos, susundan ng "Oo", kung saan galing na galing ako sa bass, ang sarap sa tenga, sobra. Parang obsessed lang, hahaha.


Nang walang babala
Lumipas ay nagbabalik pala...
Kumakapit sa natitirang sana.
Kung babalik ka pa hanggang kailan kaya?
Ako dito mag aabang na magdutong na ang patlang/


Kumusta?
=)

Presence

Here is where it all leads, this emptiness that shall be filled with words, and it shall go on, yes, it will go on, gap after blankness after void, and then, words, words, line after line surfacing, wafting on the undulating hollowness, the clean space, which shall be filled and we, we shall smooth along, certainly, like the certainty of the next blank page, the inevitability of the next word.

So keep your faiths. And I shall, mine.
The pages will hold, and the words will lock, for always.

from the weekend couch:

from the weekend couch:

Roman Polanski, 2010

"Oh yes, the wall of ego. We all have one, our equivalent of the dentist's fish tank."

None of those sapphires, today.

Give me a pretty, unpretentious scarf, instead, with nachos and lots of cheese on the side. Give me The Postal Service, please, no Maria Callas, not today. And maybe a good two hours of lingering on the sidewalk, ice cream in hand, to soothe the heat in my mouth, a pair of aqua blue, no-nonsense flip flops to cool the frazzled nerves down, and sunbeams to even out the coolness, because too cool can eventually turn into a cold, and the frozen center is what I mean to thaw, today, yes, today. Let me read my book in peace, the one where happy endings come true, but not before the heroine decides she will live her life, first. Then you can pull my hair back in a pony, or pigtails, and bring in lots of wind to make the loose tendrils dance, and I will sashay to the song in my head, in my head, the songs in my head that I will listen to, finally, after long stretches of pretending, of pretensions, of teetering along heights and trying my damnedest not to appear like I am teetering, no stiff trousers and turtlenecks, give me my short shorts and tank top, make the shorts gray, the top pink, thank you, no make-up, no excel formulas, no worries. No. Today, I will laugh and sing and dance, and to hell with what they all may think, let them have double dutch ice cream.

Or, strawberry.

Beatles- two of us

Today,

it's "Julia", "Norwegian Wood", "Something", "And I Love Her", "Eleanor Rigby", "Two of Us", "I Feel Fine", "You're Gonna Lose That Girl", and "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" all around me. I realize that The Beatles have so many lovely songs, and most of them sound really familiar even if I rarely touch my Beatles playlist, just because I grew up in a house where their music was a Sunday morning staple, thanks to my dad.

Oh, but now, I alternately sit and lie on the bed, wrapped in a jacket and a blanket, nursing tonsillitis and a bad cough. Been drinking lots of water like a good girl, though swallowing is agony and the cough makes my already sore throat hurt even more. Yet I am thankful, 

thankful that I have the Beatles to coo me to sleep, to sing the pain away.

Here it comes again,

that blah feeling, that "BBB: Bored Beyond Belief" status on facebook, that perpetual stare at the ceiling, that urge to roll the eyes over most--no, over everything, that limpness, that utter lack of interest in anything except nothing, that vacuity, that pull to doldrums-land that even coffee can't pull back, that other BBB: Blankness, Barrenness, Bleakness rearing its ugly head.

Was it a gust of wind that brought it in? But, I suddenly miss Katipunan, that strip where the National Bookstore, Cravings, and Sweet I are, that strip in front of Ateneo where a fairly new Starbucks is nestled, where I know I could spend a whole evening, just watching the people walk in and out, or stay and laugh or space out, where I know I'm sure to grow nostalgic over remembering my student days in UP Diliman, because that strip was a constant piece of concrete, a favorite tambayan of those days, along which I would saunter --at times, aimlessly, at times, with a purpose , like, to buy a book at National, or, to give in to a Sweet I cake craving--wait, may Tita Amys' pa ba dun?

Hayyyy.

Is it summer already?
Hmp. Thought so. Time to switch to iced coffee.
Hate it.

Daphne, in my time (part 3)

at its swiftest. The limbs fail

to persevere, though the mind
endures, still, the shadows

lengthen, two shadows--

soon, the night, the shadows,

touching, the plea, the wind,

the truth, one shadow, still,

the other, breaking, finally, the 

end.

Ito daw ako, sabi nya

"You have a poetic sensibility and an ability to see beyond the day to day. You often seem to be living in a higher realm, or to be not-of-this-earth. Occasionally you imagine interior lives for friends and associates that are near-complete fabrications based on your fears or hopes for the future. You are often not aware of your own feelings. You have a strong sense of right and wrong, and because of this are often disappointed. Despite what can sometimes be a destructive inward-turning anger, you are very gentle. You are sometimes a bit out of touch with the ebb and flow of modern life. If your behavior is out of synch with your moral values, a severe psychic disturbance can result. Because connectivity is so important to you, you can become quiet and sulky if you feel that others around do not understand your point of view."


This is the result of a test I took, which I found over at Luis K's blog.

See how he makes love to the guitar