Romancing the lion

I did not discover him by accident. I remember Pat Evangelista quoting a snippet from Why We Travel in her Rebel Without A Clue (now Method to Madness) column, in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Then I went on looking for more of his essays like the one on Solo Travel and found myself going back to his travelogues from time to time. I would like to constantly lose myself, and then find myself.      

The first Pico Iyer book that I got is The Lady and The Monk–this, I discovered by accident at Fully Booked. I was looking for a copy of Tropical Classical which I saw in one of the shelves like a month before that. To my surprise, the bookstore personnel lavished me with seven books: The Global Soul, Tropical Classical, The Lady and The Monk, Video Night in Kathmandu, Falling Off the Map, Cuba and The Night and Sun After Dark. I was not familiar with his books back then but I have read that he was to have a book about the Dalai Lama published in late 2008 or early 2009.

I had an instant interest in Falling Off the Map having fallen off–literally–North America to Chile and Argentina. It talked about ”lonely” countries and proposed that Argentina, for one, is because of  some lost heritage which I couldn’t reconcile at the time having seen how much it has preserved a Hispanic culture. But then, I have not really lived there and stayed for just a week so I cannot tell; besides, the only city I went to was its colonial capital. I thought I could let go of the book after scanning a few pages.

There was attraction–fatal, I surmised, while I was reading the summary–towards The Lady and The Monk having been “previously” infatuated with cultural crossings. Fatal because I was trying to look for some connection to the main characters and to their story apart from the fact that Zen Buddhism, for the first, after the longest, time,  again, rang a bell. I was reliving a supposedly buried past, reopening a supposedly closed book–no, closure is in question.

I loved the book because of Iyer’s (the first impulse is really to say Pico’s) clear depiction of Japan and the Japanese heart. It captured the silences in the temples and the intertwined fates of monks and women that is exalted in Japanese poetry–sensual, like the burning of an incense. It was absorbing, to me, because of his and Sachiko’s startling commonalities–a fascination with books, and their favourite books. Iyer’s heart listens as his mind sharply observes.

I bought The Lady and The Monk for roughly six hundred bucks at Fully Booked and found the same book at Booksale for eighty pesos a month after. The author deserves the higher price, I consoled myself–besides, the one at Booksale looked a little older and dull.

But I think that life is, more often than not, fair. I went back to Booksale a week after and found a crisp copy of Sun After Dark for one hundred twenty-seven pesos–the regular price of which, at Fully Booked, is more than six hundred bucks. The spine is slightly creased but the book looks really new. 

Sun After Dark  was more absorbing, at least to me, than The Lady and The Monk–contrary to what some, in goodreads, find to to be a loss of momentum.

“But the true subject of Sun After Dark is the dislocations of the mind in transit. And so Iyer takes us along to meditate with Leonard Cohen and talk geopolitics with the Dalai Lama. He navigates the Magritte-like landscape of jet lag, ‘a place that no human had ever been until forty or so years ago.’ And on every page of this poetic and provocative book, he compels us to redraw our map of the world.”

The chapters on Cohen, the Dalai Lama and W.G. Sebald stand out–you get a piece of them, and that makes you want to read more about them.

Cohen is very refreshing, introspective and eloquent. The book mentions that this “self-tormented soul” once claimed that he had torn everyone who reached out for him and yet “ended his most recent collection of writings with a prayer for ‘the precious ones I overthrew for an education in the world.”

I also admire how the vibrant Pico was able paint the dark and gloomy Sebaldian travel account and writing. If anything, the Sebaldian disposition is probably an antithesis of Pico’s.

Sun After Dark is insightful and contemplative. It makes you stop and think. Somebody suggested that Pico, in the chapter about the Dalai Lama, had not been successful in offering an answer to the predicament of Tibet which I believe is not the goal of the book. The question of which is not what solution Sun After Dark (out of Pico’s conversations with the Dalai Lama) can offer but, I think, how much interest it can rouse in the reader to discover Tibet, to try to understand its struggles and to join its cause–which is the very cause of the Dalai Lama.

Early this evening, I dropped by Powerbooks to check if the “only” copy of The Open Road is still in the lonely shelf where it has been sitting for two-to-three months already. I had been battling in the past whether I should buy it for a thousand bucks or wait, indefinitely, for a copy at Booksale. I panicked a bit when I didn’t see it–initially–and grabbed it when I realised I was just not looking thoroughly.

Now, I’m off–to another journey.  

*the photo of my Sun After Dark book was taken by my “paparazzi” friend, Mian–more of her photos are in http://cjaey.multiply.com/

 “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves.” 

Past turbulent skies and brown and blue-green eyes, I met and befriended forty-something Cuban nurse Eneida (folks call her Anita, she said), forty-four-year-old Brazilian professora Adriana and thirty-something Jamaican English teacher Carla. I also met a thirty-something estranghero named Mario and another young Argentino whose name I did not get to know.

Anita and Adriana promised to keep in touch. Now, I’m reminded to check on a Tracy Chapman song called The Promise as Carla wanted me to; I had her listen to Ani difrranco’s self-evident to her delight— “this song is radical” she laughed heartily. She wants Obama to win and asked me what I think.       

Mario gleefully told me that I am the estranghera- that I was in Cordoba- when I questioned how a stranger like him whom I just met in the past hour along Av. Vélez Sársfield could be holding my hand as if we were stars of serendipity. I had been wondering if a fixer or a snatcher in Argentina could look as decent and as charming as he did. I am not sure if I should be sorry that I met him roughly two hours before I had to leave for the airport but I am not. Still, he was some kind of an icing to the cake.

I had my picture taken with Anita but my camera ran out of battery charge while I was at the airport lounge with Adriana. I didn’t have my picture taken with Mario; and my two good friends Carla (The Barla) and Charmian (The Miming) can’t seem to forgive me for that. I didn’t get the chance to go back to Cordiez Supermercado to thank the young Argentino who helped me buy goods sold in Argentine Peso with a twenty-US-dollar-bill. The banks were closed at that time as it was a holiday.

“When I travel alone, I find myself having one-on-one encounters with people and places that leave my heart shaking and my sense of direction turned around,” said Pico Iyer on solo travel.

I stayed at Windsor Hotel in 214 Buenos Aires Street; and reported for work in a building near that corner where Entre Rios and Independencia streets cross. I went there for work in the hope that I may add value to a team who had to trust that I had something for them. I am very glad that they did.

I met some whom I discovered to be really warm, and that made me realise how little I know about people and nations- what more the whole world?

It is liberating to come back after looking at things from a different perspective. It is liberating to come back knowing the things you don’t want to go back to. Walking away is easier this time. And I am braver.

I vowed to travel for the joy of “leaving” my “certainties behind,” to “journey toward possibility” and “pick the places we don’t walk away from.”

But there are also places we want to go back to, and there is a place I want to go back to.

I am writing again. Sorry, friends, this is where we left off last month- the thief (an kawatan)- or are you glad I must be trying to shed some light on the subject today?

I have been incubated in a pseudo-relationship for six months, and six months is oppressive enough- I have a feeling that no egg will ever hatch. Perhaps, the temperature isn’t high enough or that it has not been stable all along. You know when things are going nowhere- at least when you have a goal or when you are clear about what you want.

Now, I want to get out- panic is very much welcomed. Nothing is more pathetic, I think, than waking up each day hoping for an SMS from your affliction- it is just the wrong side of the bed. It sets the agenda for the day. It controls your happiness. You continue to rotate in your own axis but you almost stop revolving. A year is almost over but you always wake up to the same day of non-orgasmic agony.

“He got you hook, line and sinker,” a good friend verbally slapped me, and I liked that intensity. It worked for a week. Getting out is not so much of a problem- not coming back is. I think that this has beaten me to the punch in getting to the truth: “A woman begins by resisting a man’s advances and ends by blocking his retreat.” That’s my truth today.

I think that I am in a stupor.

We pick the places we don’t walk away from. I like that. Joan Didion said that. But if you could slam the door for me, please, I would appreciate that.

6:30 am;June 3, 2008 

babaye…ikid paglakat

tipakadto sa purtahan

hinay-hinaya pagtrangka

iton nga waray aringasa

ayaw paragaaka

kay maabat an kawatan

nga maninira ka na-

uuwaton ka na liwat

ikapira ka na nasalisihan?

diri ka la gihapon nagmamaan

diri mapaid an kawatan

san imo kakurian

trangkahi pati an luyo

para waray gud maagian

ayaw pag-abrihi bisan manuktok

iluba gad, ayaw pagpadara

kun guintatagayan ka pa naman

sin istorya nga matam-is ura-ura

kay kadali mo gad mahubog-

makaturog ka na liwat

kumita ka sa imo atubangan

guintaplong ka, pagmata

manguyngoy ka na liwat?

husto na, panrangka!

3:30 am; June 4, 2008

The pro-Arroyo tag is overrated. It has deceived several people- that includes the president, of course- into thinking that Cebuanos fail, or refuse, to see the excesses of the current administration. The wide margin of votes that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo got over her most bitter rival in the 2004 elections is overrated just the same. “How could they bring me down?” she asked rhetorically as if her victory in Cebu has made her indispensable, and the people who voted for her, apologists. I am compelled to think that the mandate Cebu has accorded her has been prostituted.

While the streets of Metro Manila- in the heights of Jun Lozada’s testimonies- had been flooded with warm bodies protesting the above-said excesses, Cebu seemed to have remained unstirred, with very-little-to-no political noise. And so it has been dubbed, from the words of Lozada, himself, an Archdiocese of Malacañang.

I think that some intricacies have to be considered or we wallow in the superficial manifestations of the people’s sentiments like rallies or demonstrations. That is not to say that the demonstrations that have sparked in the last four months are not substantial. In this age of moral bankruptcy, it is imperative that the people get heard and we can hardly be emphatic, nowadays, without taking our grievances to the streets given that the government corrupts every institution that serves as a venue for demanding accountability.

Public dissent in Cebu, however, does not manifest in every means that of Metro Manila does. Rallies are very unpopular here. What is apparent to an observer who is not in Cebu is the disposition of its top politicians, the church- or the head of the church- and the media. They try to speak, and act, in behalf of the people but often, they fail- deliberately or not.

I am convinced that the general sentiment of the Cebuano people over the NBN-ZTE scandal, for example, is disgust. Our politicians, however, continue to proclaim allegiance to the president but I don’t think that it is because the people who voted for Arroyo do not call for accountability and do not see her culpability. I think that we are highly misrepresented.

The cab I was riding on my way to work some time last month was tuned into a local AM radio program, and I was fascinated with the comments sent, thru SMS, by the listeners on the issue of household rice hoarding which they conscientiously lambasted as a big stupidity. This government, they suggested, and I agree, is as thick-faced as to blame the people for the current crisis. One of these days, they said, the same government will accuse us of corruption- of stealing our own, taxpayers’ money. I think that the message of its sarcasm borders on the truth that anything is possible with the government that we have- anyone, and anything, is a potential scapegoat. That explains why the Lozada noise was suppressed by the rice crisis, and why Meralco takeover is cooking. I understand that these two issues deserve the people’s attention but see how nice and dirty the administration plays?

Very little has been said about Cebuanos who feel and think the same way that I do. This is not to claim that I think differently. My point is that I get dismayed with the lack and oftentimes, the absence of mobilisation in the local media. The perceived indifference is one, a failure of the media to get into the bottom of the people’s sentiment and rouse the people from stupor even as necessary; two, a failure of the local government to liberate itself from the shadow of the President and three, the obsession of some Cebuanos to be called “different,” specifically, being different from Metro Manila. I noticed how some people would deliberately ignore issues that call for collective action- Northern Imperialism is overrated.      

I am glad that the third factor I proposed invited some friends to speak out. I was told by one that it’s a matter of efficacy- what can a rally in Cebu do to oust Arroyo? Pretty much nothing- just a potential investor who changes his mind about putting up his business in the city. Another friend told me over coffee that, yes, we are naturally regionalistic but that it is just a matter of preserving the momentum our economy has gained in the last five years- are we willing to sacrifice all these?

Being in the BPO industry, I can come from a call center boom perspective. Honestly, I think that outsourcing will still be with us in the next ten years regardless of whose administration we have. I want to think that the economic growth in the past months is not a cancer but a cure. When I come to juxtapose the value of the peso and the pinch of inflation, I start to think again. The abuses of the administration is a very expensive price to pay so I wonder if we can ever concretise what it is that we are sacrificing our moral imperatives for. I gloat, and gleefully, at that, when I scan the paper and see the peso plunging from 40 to 41 or 41 to 42. No, that I have dollars to exchange for pesos but that I see the foreign exchange as the administration’s talisman- like nothing can touch it as long as the peso is strong.

I still beg to disagree, with all due respect, that another People Power revolution is the next bold step to make. I was in Fuente Circle along with the hundreds of students who protested against the suppression of truth in not opening the “second envelope” in the height of former President Joseph Estrada’s impeachment. I was there and I cheered (aged 19 and oblivious to the dangers of the game) as the names of the generals withdrawing support from the government were being announced. How far have we gone after that? Ours is a vicious cycle- the president we install after the revolution owes the military (and only the military) the debt of gratitude. The same president would only want to keep the military to stay in office. Much has been said about the excesses of the military in Arroyo’s presidency, I am tired of it- a president surely knows whose loyalty he should keep.

This article is not an attempt to justify the perceived indifference.  This is an attempt to give voice to the Cebuanos who have given Arroyo a chance but have been disillusioned– the taxi driver who tells me he has always tuned into the NBN-ZTE hearings and believes the truth Neri is hiding is right under our nose, the newspaper vendor who insists it is the president’s husband who is screwing up her office and the officemate who can’t explain how the prices of even non-petroleum products and less-processed foods rocket– I am one of them. 

Manuel Quezon III proposed in his column some time last month a viable option which I think, too, will be a more effective way of organizing a collective thought and action. Perhaps, I can only speak for myself or perhaps, too, I speak for many as, like Ani difranco, I stand up and shout “impeachment.”

The lights are out. This is not the first time  our house has sat dim-lit in this corner while the rest of the households held darkness hostage to the flourescent glow.

The electric fans are out, too, probably happy that they are given an hour off mechanical labour. A cardboard makes a good makeshift fan.

The issue is not global warming but like the ice caps that collapse because they can no longer stand the heat, my weeklong confinement in the dark teaches me lessons like the ones a fed-up lover does. You go about your day, come home, sleep and wake up- almost unsurprised- to the realisation that your electric service company has decided to put an end to its ordeal.

You had it coming.

And so you start to live with inconvenient truths. Truths like food leftovers decompose in the fridge, that they stink, and that they stink bad. Pandora’s Box would surely make a bad refrigerator brand.

I live in a corner unreached by civilisation but at least, I can expect my electric bill to go down this cut-off. 

Let there be light.

It was an epiphany when I stumbled over the phrase today…for two reasons- one, I just realized that the meaning it conveys is timeless, and two, The Technologian Student Press is one of the best places I have ever been.

Today, I am reminded that a disregard of direction is not courage or confidence. The paths we take are supposed to be perpendicular to the stars.  

Poor song, it seems to me now that I was projecting my little sadness to it when I asked The Miming why said song is sad. Alliteration is unintended.

It is an early Saturday morning, and I initially told her that I am sad today. I didn’t know why, or probably, I was too tired to find out why. No, probability is uncalled for- I know why, and I’ll get some whipping from my good friends if I tell them so or if they get to read this entry. They had been having a hard time exorcising the demons in my head.

I used to have demons in my room at night- desire, despair, desire but that is a different song, I’m turning a whiter shade of pale again.

And I said it is depressing though I don’t have a vivid picture in mind of what it depicts. It must be the melody. It makes me want to dance- arms thrown onto some shoulders, that I bet are looking anorexic, as if to resign from my daily fight with indulgence, pulling a neck closer to a lipping. Anorexia, I figured, must be the reason why those shoulders have always been hidden in those jackets. There must be some romance left in those bones if it penetrates through the flesh.

As I write this paragraph, I am eating pancit canton. It’s past 6 pm- still a Saturday. I just woke up from a ten-hour sleep. Crying is very benevolent, sometimes, even more benevolent than my good sisters when I ask them to give me a massage in order for me to sleep. I sneaked into my bedroom, and slept, with Crying this morning. I’m alone in the house today, and I will be the entire summer so I expect it to be one wet season.

I have to take a bath now. I need to go to the office.

So I went, and I’m back at home.

It is already Sunday, 4 am, and I lie awake in this bed, poking this little keyboard, on this screen, of this handheld. There’s no music in the background. I have just stumbled over what Spinoza says in Ethics- affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et distinctam formamus ideam. ”Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.”

I feel better now.

My two whipher friends, The Miming and The Barla, are in an all-out war against the demons, and they are launching a massive campaign to pull me out of the quagmire that I am surreptitiously wallowing into.

It is like I have drunk a philter. The wisdom of the world must be the antidote. But the world is replete of different versions of what wisdom is or of which is the wiser thing to do. Let’s talk wisdom the next time. I will sleep now.

So I slept, and I woke up, and I went out with The Whiphers, and I had some fun which I should blog about in my next entry- if Work won’t envy me-and-Fun-getting-happy.

It is now Monday. It is 2 am, and I’m trying to sleep again. Annie Lennox is in the background. No, Crying isn’t around. I’ll see if somebody else knocks on my door to sleep over.

A week has passed, and it’s Saturday again.

It’s now past 1 am on a Sunday, and I’m in the office pantry, poking on the same handheld, listening to the same song.

I think now that one of the greatest glories of a man’s life is being able to transcend its ordeals- to love intensely, to hurt constructively, to suffer graciously and to live willingly.

I am seduced to dance to life- come, let’s undress our souls. 

Happy Sunday!

tell it to this famished fire

there is still a fountain beneath those parted lips

i have dug with mine before

the youth in you

that tongue- tamed and sometimes wild

endured our beating- the lashing

in the fountain

we played master and slave

deep into the crevasse

there is that water-in-the-well

i once drank it all down

like an arid desert, i preyed

we sketched our souls through these lips

and your mouth i crave

lest old age devour our youth

i paint the days

                       –little lioness; 14october06, 8:33 pm

Erap deserves more.

For the first after a long time, I like what I read about him in the paper today. I have long been complaining why the media can’t keep away from giving him the publicity he has always lavishly enjoyed but I think he deserves more these days if only to peeve him for being asked questions like- exactly like this: “was it not hypocritical of him to presume to lead the fight against corruption, accusing President Macapagal-Arroyo of such crimes when he himself was convicted of plunder?” 

I applaud, and I thank Agence France Presse (AFP) reporter Mynardo Macaraig for the straightforward question.

One can say that his argument is commonplace but why is it that, as Estrada lamented- as if we have forgotten his bastardisation of the presidential office and insult to the gullibility of the people- “nobody had ever asked him such a question in media interviews, not since he walked out of ‘rest house’ detention following his pardon.” My sentiments, exactly. And I think that it is more of a big slap to the media’s face.

It is blatant, he still lives like some god who is invulnerable even to an arrow shot right into his Achilles’ heel. He has a badly calloused shame. Or that he has deceived himself into thinking that everyone in this country, just like him, has lost his moral imperatives, anyway, so it’s okay to keep up with his fooling around.  

“I believe I am innocent. I explained it to him that people have already acquitted me and not the Sandiganbayan justices,” he said.   

I will never have baby Yana read the dictionary that he uses- the one that says acquittal is synonymous to pardon. I am also inclined to believe that somewhere a dictionary says innocence is synonymous to arrogance. 

In the event that “the opposition fails to come to an agreement (on a common candidate),” then he will run, again, for President in 2010.  

Before, being critical of what he says or do was more like wrestling with a ghost. With his most recent annoyance, however, I think that the media can do us a huge favor. It should either be we annoy him to death with the seriousness of our intention to question his credibility (or to validate his incredibility) or we boycott him.    

If the reason why television networks still the cover the affairs of Estrada is because of public clamor, then we rightfully deserve the mockery that we are faced with. But the news I watched on TV last Christmas Day showing Erap playing with his grandchildren and his son, for example, was a deliberate one casted by the media upon the public.  

It is a sad fact that part of the populace still worships Estrada but his messianic movie roles are not really the ones to blame. He deserves a boycott but what the papers and the television tell us is something else- as if nothing happened.   

I was frustrated with the footage as much as I was sometime in November when he was in Sunday Inquirer’s banner being the guest honor in the opening of a Greenhills mall just about a week or two after he was released from prison- if I remember it correctly.  

In the off-chance that the media sees our plight in the context of forgiving and forgetting, then, indeed, it has become instrumental in idiotising the masses.  

This is not to say that the mainstream media is useless. While I think that Web logs are excellent alternatives to searing commentaries and critical thought, I believe that the press remains indispensable and relevant to our times.  

We need to beat the crap out of Erap- exorcise the demon that causes his ego to bloat and scrape off that metaphorical calluse that makes him act like a god.    

It takes two to tango, people always say. Erap can’t dance alone. Let’s stop playing the music that makes him groove.