fullman*

Archive for the ‘Essays’ Category

Today I decided to stay put and hunker down. The year has just ended, and in a few days I am turning 32.

You have to admit that 2009 was a strange year: it had 3 arms, an extra face, a 13th month that had 365 days. It was as if each day is always bent on eating the next one, each week cannibalizing the entire month, scattering red entrails on the floor: typhoons, floods, immorality, backhoes, Gloria, an almost eruption.

A pause then is important. 2009 deserves a proper burial. A comma is not enough, this year demands a period, a full stop.

From where I am I can see an ant pursuing a scent. It has no other agenda, no flash flood to worry about, no relief goods to pack. No Zen profundity to its movements, just the single-mindedness of a line.

We need to treat this year as if it were a line that unravels. Last year was a border.

I stretched and my feet touched China. A physiological feat, but what for? We only need to look around us, stare at each other, to know that we carry our own Great Walls.

Last year, I urged a few friends and some kindred spirits to pluck their hearts and wear them on their sleeves. I did. There was blood trickling down my arm, but it didnt give me love. Instead, my heart was yanked away, and all that remained was a bloody scribble on the pavement: I was here.

But who cares. Take it away, the heart doesnt grow still anyway. When excited it cavorts with the throat. When cold, it clenches itself. When broken it doesnt smash, it implodes and eats itself. When lonely, it wanders. Lonelier, it logs in, uploads, and updates its status.

Quote me if Im wrong, the heart is never still.

Last year, you jumped and I didnt follow. When I finally did I was already on my own. So dont blame me if I didnt welcome the new year with a jump: Id rather begin with a full stop.

Somewhere in Nueva Ecija, townsfolks dangle clear plastic bags filled with water in their windows to ward off flies. It obviously doesn’t work; even the local people I asked about the practice admitted as much. It somehow reminds me of a rural belief allegedly propagated by a UPLB professor that homosexuality is a product of pesticides. In short, Martial Law babies like me turned out to be gay because of Masagana rice. I really can’t explain why the notion persists.

Going back to plastic bags with water, I think I can offer several explanations:

The first one is from the Wile E. Cayote syndrome. Wile E. Cayote is, of course, the other half in the Roadrunner and Wile E. Cayote tandem. He is a fanatic and would resort to everything just to get the utterly monosyllabic Roadrunner (Beep beep). He would employ various ACME devices, deploy ACME gadgets and explosives, lay down elaborate traps, and still he keeps on failing to catch the rather quick bird.

Anyway, the Wile E. Cayote syndrome (or WECS) states that we all have a little Wile E. Cayote in our hearts. Some pesticides – natural and artificial – can kill some houseflies, but not all of them. So some folks just have to be ingenuous: they hang plastic bags with water and pray that with sheer luck and with a little help from gravity the bags would fall and squash the hapless housefly innocently taking a quick rest just below our simple folks’ weapon of choice.

My second theory involves an idea that I harbored since childhood, which in retrospect is admittedly a little sick. I am scared of dogs. I was bitten by what seemed to be a friendly canine when I was still in pre-school. I wanted to pet it, but it bit me instead.

I believe, or rather used to believe, that the best way to ward off dogs is to get a puppy, boil it, and apply the broth to your body – just like a lotion – to repel dogs. Of course I never implemented this idea, but I honestly believed that dogs would find the scent of the cooked puppy repugnant. I think I began to dismiss the idea when I saw a dog eating adobong aso. But it still might work with houseflies – so all it takes is to catch some flies, boil them, put the cooled broth in plastic bags. Hang the bags in windows to prevent flies from entering your house. (Let me warn you, though, that when applied to humans this formula is completely illegal and that animals, too, have rights).

The last theory is based on one of the Baguio jokes that was taken seriously. The joke supposedly explains that the reason why flies and mosquitos are rare in Baguio City is that in cooler places they find it hard to fly because have to wear heavy sweaters or jackets. Thus, they’d rather stay in hot nd humid Manila.

Anyway, the plastic bags were actually cooling devices, at least in their previous state. They were actually – or formerly – the yelo (from the Spanish word hielo) that you could easily buy for one peso in your suking tindahan. People would hang them in windows to 1. cool one’s house and 2. warn houseflies that the house that they are about to enter is cold. Since we were at the heart of a rural community and buying yelo is difficult, they hang plastic bags with clear water instead, hoping that it would be enough to fool the common housefly.

Send me an email if you have other theories.

With enough bouyancy and speed, the harshest of sunlight, and generous ladles of sea-foams frothing in the outriggers of the boat, one can get a glimpse of the madness of rainbows in the middle of the ocean. I have seen several: one really has to be vigilant – wait for the ocean to slam its weight into the speeding boat, and as the spray leaps into the air, crisp and bleached from too much sun, there impaled on the darkness of the ocean several streaks of misplaced rainbows, like a mermaid’s trick on the eye.

It used to be fun to up and about when everyone is in deep slumber. when i was still a kid, if midnight catches me awake, i’d spend hours reading, or doing just about anything that comes to my mind. imagine how liberating it was: everyone was trapped in their dreams, running after what they could not have, or being chased by demons that they kept in their minds. And me, i was carving my own fantasies, pretending to be an adult too busy to indulge in sleeping.

Work, i suppose, changes everything. sleep has become an evasive commodity. it obsesses you, and you spend the entire night plucking one by one the demons that haunt you. you are bothered by a reprimand, or by a task that seems insurmountable. you think of how old you are already, and how life-lust is abandoning you. you start questioning love, and other things that are less important.

i guess sleeplessness is just other form of cynicism: otherwise, why refuse to dream?

Waking up in the middle of a storm reminds me of the wonderful chaos of drums. It is as pleasantly confusing as a parade: you don’t know where you are, you feel the noise in your skin, you feel the urge to do everything all at once. You don’t even know if it’s morning already, everything is dark and tentative as dusk or dawn.

If you are lucky, you’d get a phone call telling you that due to bad weather, work has been cancelled. The storm is supposed to force you to stay at home – thus the cancellation of work or class – but then you go berserk and plan your day as if it’s a surprise weekend, a holiday celebrating the death of a hero, or the martyrdom of a saint (or the sainthood of a martyr). What is there to do in a day of ruthless rain? Is it a book of poetry, or plainly the couch, or poetry and the couch? Good food, maybe, or sex? Is it junkfood and tv, or junkfood in the movie house? Sex with a fuck buddy or a stranger? In my couch, or in the movie house?

The rain remains relentless, and your plans are still vague, but then you realize it’s midday already, although everything remains as hazily dim as your plans. You stay in bed, and you let your imagination plan the unfolding of the day for you. When it starts looking like a porn movie, you just doze off to catch the wisp of a dream. Or you just lie in the couch, feeling plain lazy, too lazy, to get up and get things going. You wake up again, and the darkness suddenly seems permanent. You panic a little, but then you begin feeling paralyzed by hunger.

(In the refrigerator, you find: a plastic cup of cottage cheese, a bag of blueberry bagel, bottles of whatever, butter and a rack of other neighborly spreads, and in a large bowl, which occupies a quarter of the available space, you discover a greenish, purplish empire, dusty and primordial; it used to be food, but now it’s a toxic invader spreading as quickly as, pardon the racism, the Chinese civilization. In the vegetable rack, a different universe: everything is literally growing, a rainforest in the making.)

You grab from the ref things that are still surprisingly edible, and you make a mental note to raze the purple and green empire and the rainforest. You eat in the couch while watching tv, and then you switch it off to listen to the news in the radio. A child died today because of the floods, and an old lady was reported missing. The child’s body was found in a creek, and the old lady was later (much, much later) seen inside the mall, looking for love, or beauty, or maybe both.

A black out shuts off the radio and interrupts your eating. With nothing to do, you lie again in the couch. In the darkness, you feel confused: should you start asking how your own life would unravel, or should you pray for the weather to remain just how it is now?

Every night my bed grows wide. Sometimes I’m happy about it, sometimes I feel obliged to map out the loneliness of its geography.

There are nights when it becomes a vast continent of yearning. During such nights, I travel the length of its darkness, discovering along the way imprints of familiar warmth. Its emptiness contains a certain absence, and its terrains echo the curves of the body. There were times when its vastness was governed by borders, the bedsheet partitioned into acres of hatred. My bed was a site of rebellion, a conflict that either ended in cold silence or tears. I could still feel the anger; sometimes the pillows turn their back to say no.

At times it becomes an expanding universe of passion. It bursts with stars, sending electric impulses across the cosmos; the void is filled with what substance I cannot tell. Here, matter and anti-matter meet, implosions and explosions occur at the same time. You thrust and even time lose its momentum: lust is the secret of youth. This universe grows or contracts continuously – no one can absolutely be sure – and in its aftermath, you question God and hope that in every falling star wishes do come true.

There are also nights when my bed becomes an ocean of contentment. This sea placates the tired and the restless; it gives birth to poetry and endless nothingness. I am lulled to sleep by its eternal softness, and I envy the pillows that perpetually rest in its horizons – like whales in meditation – and the bedsheet that accompany its pilgrimage of silence. I’d like to get drowned in its warm waters, be toyed by its playful sunlight, and in my solitude wake up with a smile.

Once, a poor fisherman saved a wounded bird from dying in winter. The kind fisherman took care of her until her broken wing mended. Throughout the time of healing, the bird came to trust the fisherman’s pure and simple heart. When she could finally move her wings to fly, she decided to transform herself into a woman. She came back to his hut and offered to stay by his side as his wife. The unsuspecting fisherman was overjoyed by his great fortune, but, being poor, he soon found out having to feed two mouths a problem.

One day the woman offered to weave a cloth that he could sell in the village market. But she made him promise that he would never ever look in on her while she wove. The fisherman gave his word, and after many days, the woman handed him a bolt of fine silk. The cloth fetched a good price; for a while, the fisherman and the woman were happy.

Soon, their food ran out and the woman offered to weave for one last time a cloth he could sell for a very good price. Again, she wove for days and afterwards handed him a second bolt of fine silk. But she had grown pale and thin for the work of weaving had taken so much out of her. He gave her his word that this was the last bolt of silk she would weave. He went to the castle to sell to the noble household the finest cloth anyone had ever seen. The lord of the castle was pleased and paid him enough money to provide for him and his wife throughout their lives. But on his way home, one of the merchants who had seen the exceptional quality of weaving that if the weaver wove another bolt of cloth, he would help the poor fisherman sell it for a much higher price to the emperor’s household.

The fisherman, dazzled by the idea of having more money than he could imagine, told his wife to weave another bolt of silk fit for the emperor. She was astonished and asked him what he would do with more money than they would ever need in their lifetime. But the fisherman insisted; she could not dissuade him from his obsession. She sadly closed the door of her weaving room and spent many days and nights working on the third bolt of cloth.

As it was taking longer than usual, the fisherman decided to find out what was happening. Forgetting his promise, he opened the door and saw instead of his wife a Great Heron plucking out of her own body her fine feathers that she used for weaving at the loom. It was a horrifying sight and the fisherman fainted from witnessing magic.

When he came to, he heard the Great Heron beside him sing her true story. She sang her sadness at leaving, but because he did not honor his promise and had looked in on her pain, she would now fly back to the wild and be free.

The third bolt of silk was the finest any human or eye had ever touched or seen. It was delicate as snow and stained with flecks of crimson.

*The Heron Woman is an old Japanese tale