from Ann Lauterbach's "Alice in the Wasteland"

You have very low self-esteem, Alice said. Everyone here thinks the world of you;
you are always mentioned in poems and songs.
I know. It makes me cringe with shame. Moon this moon that, lovers and
moonlight, nocturnes and sonnets. It’s a total cliche. Stick an r in and you get
moron.
Alice stood up, casting a long black shadow.
Look how tall I am!
I will never be tall, answered the Moon, and disappeared behind a heavy cloud,
erasing Alice’s shadow and sending her back into the total dark.

-from Or to Begin Again

Axioms

We are parallel lines, an exponential bloom
where Zeno predicted your retreat;


and where I come through a, you come through b
—the two of us watching unyielding axioms


fill the space between us. One geometry says
we will meet, but each time I bend, you bend


toward a point beyond my reach. I want you
to be where I am, or I want to be where you are.


But a single truth has fixed us here,
and you are further for it.


-Barbara Perez

Heather Nova - Paper Cup (Love, Actually)

Wishful thinking I might be yours/ And every dream is just a dream after all/ And the night's in a paper cup/ When you want it to last/ Wishful thinking you might be mine

But how to keep

this day folded,

safe.

‎"It's hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment." 
— Jeanette Winterson

A long, loud grumble of thunder

from up there. I feel the ground beneath me shake the littlest bit. Such a chilly, windy night, on the heels of a cold, stormy day. These past 24 hours bring to mind Edgar Allan Poe and Wuthering Heights.

How wonderful to be indoors.

My current obsession:

Sa hindi inaaasahang
Pagtatagpo ng mga mundo
May minsan lang na nagdugtong,
Damang dama na ang ugong nito.
Di pa ba sapat ang sakit at lahat
Na hinding hindi ko ipararanas saýo
Ibinubunyag ka ng iyong mata
Sumisigaw ng pag-sinta.

Bakit di papatulan
Ang pagsuyong nagkulang
Tayong umaasang
Hilaga't kanluran
Ikaw ang hantungan
At bilang kanlungan mo
Ako ang sasagip saýo.

Saan nga ba patungo,
Nakayapak at nahihiwagaan na
Ang bagyo ng tadhana ay
Dinadala ako sa init ng bisig mo
Bakit di pa sabihin
Ang hindi mo maamin
Ipauubaya na lang ba 'to sa hangin
'Wag mong ikatakot
Ang bulong ng damdamin mo


Ba't di salubungin ang puso ko at kunin
ang diwang malaya, wag na wag magpapapayapa
ikaw ang pag-ibig, pakinggan ang himig ko,
wala na sanang lalayo/ mundong ito ay hihinto

Of breezes and blues

Goodness, this heat. These days (and nights), I find myself sorely tempted to forgo my  heels for flip-flops, my turtlenecks for tank tops, these concrete floors for sand. The daily latte has already been replaced by iced coffee.
The chilly breezes have been so unceremoniously shooed away, and summer is irrefutably here, languishing in the sun and partying away the buzzing, moonlit nights.
All these talk of  cool, blue waters and beach bumming are distracting me from my day-to-day, makes me wonder what it would be like to get away, far away, in a little dress abloom with flowers, and just lie on the warm sand, count the stars, and fall asleep to the sound of waves crashing and the drifts of a guitar and the beat of a lone drum cavorting in the distance, a snappy, frisky breeze kissing my cheeks...

"Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation." 

— Gabriel García Márquez

Apprehensions

There is this white wall, above which the sky creates itself --
Infinite, green, utterly untouchable.
Angels swim in it, and the stars, in indifference also.
They are my medium.
The sun dissolves on this wall, bleeding its lights.

A grey wall now, clawed and bloody.
Is there no way out of the mind?
Steps at my back spiral into a well.
There are no trees or birds in this world,
There is only sourness.

This red wall winces continually:
A red fist, opening and closing,
Two grey, papery bags --
This is what i am made of, this, and a terror
Of being wheeled off under crosses and rain of pieties.

On a black wall, unidentifiable birds
Swivel their heads and cry.
There is no talk of immorality amoun these!
Cold blanks approach us:
They move in a hurry.

by Sylvia Plath

Song

The weight of the world 
     is love. 
Under the burden 
     of solitude, 
under the burden 
     of dissatisfaction 

     the weight, 
the weight we carry 
     is love. 

Who can deny? 
     In dreams 
it touches 
     the body, 
in thought 
     constructs 
a miracle, 
     in imagination 
anguishes 
     till born 
in human-- 
looks out of the heart 
     burning with purity-- 
for the burden of life 
     is love, 

but we carry the weight 
     wearily, 
and so must rest 
in the arms of love 
     at last, 
must rest in the arms 
     of love. 

No rest 
     without love, 
no sleep 
     without dreams 
of love-- 
     be mad or chill 
obsessed with angels 
     or machines, 
the final wish 
     is love 
--cannot be bitter, 
     cannot deny, 
cannot withhold 
     if denied: 

the weight is too heavy 

     --must give 
for no return 
     as thought 
is given 
     in solitude 
in all the excellence 
     of its excess. 

The warm bodies 
     shine together 
in the darkness, 
     the hand moves 
to the center 
     of the flesh, 
the skin trembles 
     in happiness 
and the soul comes 
     joyful to the eye-- 

yes, yes, 
     that's what 
I wanted, 
     I always wanted, 
I always wanted, 
     to return 
to the body 
     where I was born. 

                         San Jose, 1954

by Allen Ginsberg

Bend

Daphne, dazzled
by a slice of radiance,
finds herself

turning--

The Way Things Work

is by admitting 
or opening away. 
This is the simplest form 
of current: Blue 
moving through blue; 
blue through purple; 
the objects of desire 
opening upon themselves 
without us; the objects of faith. 
The way things work 
is by solution, 
resistance lessened or 
increased and taken 
advantage of. 
The way things work 
is that we finally believe 
they are there, 
common and able 
o illustrate themselves. 
Wheel, kinetic flow, 
rising and falling water, 
ingots, levers and keys, 
I believe in you, 
cylinder lock, pully, 
lifting tackle and 
crane lift your small head-- 
I believe in you--
your head is the horizon to
my hand. I believe 
forever in the hooks. 
The way things work 
is that eventually 
something catches.

by Jorie Graham

The Dangers of This Craft

by Ma. Fatima V. Lim Wilson

For your own good, do not claim to be a poet.
-Advice of a well-meaning friend.


How we sing, even as we are boiled alive.
Those who torment us strain to sustain
our last notes. In a landscape
of sameness, our crooked towers scrape
sensibilities, the well-trained eye.
Why, when starved, do we thrive?
Remembrance of childhood's bread
rising. The taste of dulcified 
droppings of air. Our well-
meaning friends beg us, please,
speak in the measured tones
of the mediocre. Show off
our mastery of muteness,
the ambidextrous virtuosity
of work-stained hands. Let
those knitting needles, heavy
handled axes fly. Why must
we hear voices? See the moving
parts of still objects? And so,
we insist we no longer see
through white-washed walls.
We confess our dreams of flying
have ceased. We scheme,
the miracle of money keeping us
awake. Our pleasure lies
in memorizing the exactness
of recipes. We are found to be
most eloquent when quiet, even
as we argue happily with the teeming
inhabitants opening doors in our heads.
We stare seemingly unmoved at the fire
of our burning books, all the while
enthralled, reading secrets in the flames.
They think they've killed us off
even as somewhere, everywhere, a child
recalls the beat of the ocean womb.
They dance upon our tombs, unaware
of how they have fallen
victim to the rhythm
of our singing bones.

From this morning's browse

Poor Love, you were but Color, Motif, Mood --
Need of my poetry, not my womanhood.

- from "Love is My Need" (1945),
Trinidad Tarrosa-Subido

Mooning over this cup of coffee

The interminable tapeworm of time unreels
unwinds and stops dead.
-Ophelia Alcantara Dimalanta, "The Time Factor"

Where he is, my dad is currently building his fish pond. Miles away, sun-lovers are frolicking on beaches. Sundry, unknown distances separate me from the bibliophile chewing away at his book with a cup of coffee; from the little ones having snacks of milk and cookies; from the corporate dweller crunching away at data and gossip; from the mountain-climber trekking, inhaling the breeze of the outdoors. A butterfly is cooing, soundlessly, at a newly-opened blossom, and a puppy barks at a yellow moth, flitting by.

I wonder what twilight is like in other places. Where I am, and in the places I've been, it is almost always sad.

What's it like, where you are?

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

Lit Geek Update: What I'm Reading Right Now

"He said, "The word for moonlight is moonlight." 

from the weekend couch:

Revisited

Sophia Coppola, 1999

From this book:

Jeffrey Eugenides, 1993

"From five, they had become four, and they were all the living and the dead, becoming shadows..."

Daphne as the Runaway Bride, and vice versa

After a "eureka!" moment a couple of days ago, which happened while I was watching "Runaway Bride" for the 17th time, I am finally allowing myself to verbalize the idea that I have been toying with, since:

That my obsession with the movie and the myth are intertwined, in more ways than one.

photo from this site

In the end, Maggie Carpenter finds true love, and Daphne turns into a tree, both of which could very well stand for deliverance. 

And as for me, well, let's see.

from the weekend couch:

Had to have this:

(Despicable Me, 2010)

after my mind got blown away to super negaland by this:

(Requiem For a Dream, 2000)

Whew. Darren Aronofsky, you are definitely something else.

Right Here

the method to this madness the drifts the thrums pulsating the quiet in this music the solitude in this togetherness the reeling mind reeling from this tumult your childhood their childhood my childhood our childhoods one childhood locked this love of form and song and memory this love this love subterfuge and delusion the rhythms in one rhythm ecstasy in one moment misery in the next redemption in the symmetry symmetry in song the anguish of a breaking heart the broken heart conceding conceding at last clarity in this haze of smoke and melody the descant and the silence this silence tormentingly deceivingly eternal but the bliss in the music the music always the music

Daphne, in my time (part 2)

Next, the mind,
where the chase leads,
the mind--
where the chase is

Stripin'

Lovin' lovin' lovin'

via Joanna Goddard

Then, they brought out the numbers.

The two-day training course was going smoothly, if a bit without any major surprises and/or excitements. I had successfully psyched myself up to be in its zone (after a little while of battling with the worries and sorries that I would've been better off working on my deliverables, instead of being stuck in a training class for two whole days, burning my bum off from all that sitting and cramping up my face from all that smiling and pretending to be interested when what I really wanted was to be somewhere else) and decided to breeze through it all as best as I could.

And I was doing fine, I guess, for someone who hadn't attended a training session (as part of its audience) for quite a time. I decided that I was going to open my mind to learning, and so I earnestly listened and happily jumped into the classroom discussions, surreptitiously checking the clock on the wall, from time to time.

Until the last two hours of the class, when the trainer's voice boomed with the line, "now, we'll be doing a bit of Math."

Bummer. Major, real-time bummer.

It all just went downhill for loveless, hapless me, forced to crunch away at numerous statistical formula, sadly confronting my undeniable mortality as I worked, as slow as a tortoise, on all those text-free and extremely unromantic excel sheets.

Oh, but there were always the friendly seat mates who were understanding enough of the mathematically challenged lot of this world and who were more than willing to help.

Whew.

I therefore conclude (for the umpteenth time) that I am an English Major.

Goodbye, Liz

Her unquestionable celebrity and prolific contributions to the arts; her tumultuous love affairs and the numerous men who chased her shamelessly and whom she shamelessly claimed; her efforts at humanitarianism and equality of rights; her determination to live life to its brim along with all its heartaches and turbulences; her breathtaking beauty and unabashedly violet eyes...

Elizabeth Taylor was, and will always be, a force to reckon with.

She was a Pisces.

Damien Rice - Volcano - Official Video

Found: Miles Davis' "Bitches Brew"

and am lovin' it to bits!!!