...JUBILANT JOURNEY (conclusion)

As soon as we left The Sportstown, I knew we were about to hit the border in no time at all. It helped that my Geography is proficient, uhmm, but there was actually a tell-tale sign right inside the train. A uniformed woman with badge, 2 way-radio, curious eyes, the works, was collecting the forms we signed some minutes prior and was casually interviewing passengers as to the purposes of their border-cross. "Customs", life professor whispered to me, and I instantly thought of those espionage movies where clandestine agents of some governments cautiously rendezvous with their contacts inside trains under the noses of border patrols. I could have played out a game by deliberately trying to look suspicious to the prying eyes of the lady-agent but suddenly got out of the little stupor when a family of about 5, Indian looking all, were herded out of the bus by another Customs agent. "Will they be sent back?", I asked l.p. "They could even be detained", she retorted, "That sucks", I said as I slumped on my seat and decided to keep quiet.

Sure enough, we crossed the border in no time at all and the voice on the speaker proudly announced - as he must have proudly announced a thousand times in his entire career as a proud announcer - "There it is at your left ladies and gentlemen, the world famous yadda, yadda, yadda...". So we all obediently turned our necks sideways like inimitable onlookers gawking at a scene of a crime; some kids at my back were asking, "Where is it?, where is it?", and I could have answered, "The hell would I know" were it not for the fact I was still thinking of the Indian family. Actually, the only thing I could see from my seat was the emerald waters of the river and the awesome steel bridge accross it, but like those kids I could not see the cataracts. Maybe we were the ones suffering from cataracts. So, instead, I closed my eyes hoping to feel the rage, wishing to hear the thunderous roar so they say, but all I heard was the chug-chug-chug of our stupid train.

Fast forward to an hour. The cataracts were before me, before my eyes. Funny how they're called cataracts, all three of them, while I considered the only similarity between these wonders on the one hand, and the disease on the other, being their deftness to cloud the eyes. The rest were differences: for the former you sing out loud and rejoice in having been given the chance to see, for the latter you only curse in having been condemned with the opposite...

Hundreds of thousands of cubic ft/sec. of water go down the precipices at a furious pace and I begun to wonder how the ground was able to withstand the ferocity of falling water, at such a tremendous amount. It was unbelievable, the meeting of the falling water and the river it was falling unto was so determinedly violent that a cloud of mist, huge and tall as a building, was a permanent effect. There are several cataracts in the world that could be more enormous than these ones: between Zambesi and Zimbabwe, between Brazil and Paraguay, but where was the need to see those when these alone already overwhelmed you? I mean, they were so enormous and so huge, the gorge so deep, that, well, they looked so small. Why? The enormity was so unbelievable your eyes seemed to tell yourself nothing could be that big.

And to think that these were all about water, the journey of water, from lake to precipices to river to wherever. Just like our journey. It was, and will be, a journey to wherever.
_____________

* Charles Wright
The Other Side Of The River
** Henry W. Longfellow
Paul Revere's Ride
***Shintaro Tanikawa
River
****Antonio Machado
Passageways
*****Agnes Nemes Nagy
Between

SNIPPETS... (Continuation)

Mother,
Why is the river singing?

Because the skylark praised the river's voice.***

The "river journey" came to an end at the river bend - the spot where The River naturally turns westward and our train had to proceed up north towards its destination at the border. It was an unforgettable part of the trip, that "river journey", which made the parting of ways kind of difficult to accept for someone as river-sentimental as myself. I was expecting the guy on the speaker to accord a higher "riverence" for such parting, rather than announce a casual and uninspired "That's it for the river-view ladies and gentlemen, and now if you will please look at your left, that huge building over there yadda, yadda, yadda..."

Past gray crags and red chalk mountains
the train advances, swallowing steel rail.
The row of shiny windows
carries a double imprint, cameolike,
seen through the silver pane, repeated.
Who has pierced the heart of time? ****

I was neither a Justin T nor a singing crybaby and so I did not sing, Cry me a river, sweet Jesus! but instead I spent time listening to my life professor's anecdotes of sweet and bittersweet, affectionately watching her change essence from roses to neuroses, feeling the flair of her concurrence, smelling the tempest of her discord, tasting the sanctity of her counsel.

And then out of nowhere, fooom! this city came into view.

One of the three biggest cities up north, this first one we hit was the most eerie. We could have traveled in time, I swear, because the old buildings of ravaged red bricks made the ground looked red, too, and the air and the ambience all seemed to carry a red hue, and you would have to say, I did not want to party here and paint the town red because it is already red so let me get the hell out of here!!! The city looked so much like the setting of old western movies where the only thing moving was time, but it was sooo sloooww, and sooo ooolllldd. At one point, I was thinking that a dude a la Dillinger would climb up the train for a great train robbery, and I was thinking, too, that if that happened he would have to contend with my life professor, "Hey you with the crappy moustache, you smell awful you know, here's ten dollars and buy yourself a bar of soap and find a better life!"

In a few hours came the next city, a great university town, the vibrance and dynamism immediately evident even if, lo, it was summer yet and classes were not to open until the next month. Ahhhh school!!!, I could only say and reminisce my own college days, half wishing at the same time to have studied along the halls of that university over there, close to downtown, so conducive, so inspiring, Would I have loved literature more in this place? hmmm...

And finally, the last city before the border, a great one, dearie me, a great sports town you jock! The home of one of the most fanatical fans in all of professional sports, this city spawned the production of a movie with this plot, listen and shiver: a mother continued to bear hatred for her grownup son for an unforgiveable reason - during the only time the city's team played in the championship (and they ended up as champions), she was at the hospital delivering him.

The nerve! And I have to surmise, there must be something in the environment to have caused these people to act this way. And I have to conclude, albeit sardonically, this must be caused by what's on the border, our destination, the raging of the waters, the roaring of the cataracts.

Aches and stabbings,
visions, voiceless aqueducts,
inarticulate rising,
unbearable tension
of verticals between up and down.*****

(to be concluded)

SNIPPETS FROM A JUBILANT JOURNEY

Are we there yet?

This, I did not ask. For how could I when every minute of the journey left a sight to behold, a breath to hold, a moment to remember. We may need to ask Sir J to confirm what this travel writer once said: To cross the Golden Gate Bridge is to be a student of fog. But I'll be the travel writer here and I'll confirm myself, ha-ha: To do a train-ride along The River is to be a student of concentration.

I want to sit by the bank of the river,
in the shade of the evergreen tree,
And look in the face of whatever,
the whatever that's waiting for me.*

Picture this diversity: To my left, visible from my enormous train window were granite pinnacles and boulders; a marsh of lilies; small castles on the edges of cliffs; soaring peregrine falcons; beds of lilacs and squadrons of wildflowers; blue sky - all sharing introspection with The River of my dreams.

And then, to my right, by my side, let it be stated on record and under oath, I promise to tell the truth, so help me God, is My Life Professor, she with the discerning eyes and prominent jaw, she whose every breath carries a purpose, she whose every glare generates a sparkle, she whose every twitch connotes a value, and she whose every word reveals a substance.

And last, which at that moment could be the least, was the book I shifted between my left hand and right: Alejo Carpentier's Explosion In A Cathedral, a jarring account of the period of Enlightenment, the French Revolution and its global vicissitudes, specifically in the Carribean, an era so enlightening it was a time of me-against-myself attitude, such grandeur!

I was thinking now. The only thing missing to complete my fulfillment during that journey was the melody of Anton Dvorak's Tempo di Valse or George Butterworth's The Banks of Green Willow, but then again I would have been totally overwhelmed, sufficient enough for me to see the silhouette of my soul rise in ecstacy...

There are things of which I may not speak;
There are dreams that cannot die;
There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak,
And bring a pallor into the cheek,
And a mist before the eye. **

(this journey is still ongoing...)

THE SPLENDOR OF AMERICAN SPLENDOR

Comics show the complexity of ordinary lives. This line was uttered by Harvey Pekar to his then date Joyce Brabner, played by Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis, respectively, and this line, ladies and gentlemen, also sums up the irony and intelligence in what, by far, is the greatest movie I have seen all of this year and last.

I may be biased. For a number of times my acts and attitudes had been dictated somewhat by the philosophies of animated characters appearing in strips of 4 or 5 frames, conversing in balloons. This child-man, since childhood, is a product of the cartoon revolution and if a composite sketch was needed by a professional profiler, the comics are a rich source: I have the big head and melancholy of Charlie Brown; the metabolism, cluelessness, and handyman-idiocy of Dagwood Bumstead; the loyalty to work and all relationships of Joe Cobb; the abodic (?) laziness of Hagar the Horrible (though I take a bath many times a day); the ability of Danae (Non-Sequitur) to project and look back without putting the prospects and retrospects to good use, sucks; and the patience of Dilbert (but unlike him, my ties are perpetually unwrinkled).

Really, I am not biased. When I entered the moviehouse I did not even know American Splendor was about a cartoonist's movie nor that American Splendor is an underground comicbook which, because of this movie, may jeopardize its aura of raw cartoon power in the same mould that pop culture had eaten up the poetic sensibility of Mike Myers or the mystery of The Edge. The movie's magical foundation is not the comic's touch - though that's pretty strong, too - but it was in the message fully and convincingly relayed that if we only stopped and gave a chance to pay attention, there is happiness attained even in the loneliest of streets, warmth during the coldest of all winters, and wisdom from the jerkiest and nerdiest of people. Life professor was right: Compared to a fish, the directors Berman and Pulcinni tried to show the fishbones with heads and tails, bereft of meat, but like a cat you still see beauty in the skeleton, let humans have the flesh!

The fresh approach was worth a million. It was in part a theatre within a movie within a movie (don't get turned off, it was not that complicated) and at times, the characters' thoughts were delivered to the audience via a balloon pointing to the thinking character, a la cartoon strip, and sometimes the characters morph into their comic character (Harvey Pekar's comics were about himself and the people around him, a true-to-life cartoon), juxtaposing reality with animation, showing the metaphysics of living that we, all of us, in the fact of our existence, partly real people, partly cartoon characters. And don't we always ask...

What's up doc?

NOTES ON READING


Calm before the storm. I feel the calm while on vacation, unwinding, shrugging off the last strands of stress, learning life's lessons from my life professor, watching the balance of nature and its balancing act with the unnature, right here in the middle of the jungle, somewhere east, somewhere north, and I ask myself why can't it be this way everyday?, and myself answers the I, Because sometimes we do need the storm.

And while stress-free, let me bore you with what does not bore me, let the bread of life be broken, let the cup of literature be poured...

Lesson One: Reading

- Since I was a kid, I developed this habit of smelling what I read. That was how I immersed myself with the lives of the novels' characters, a merging of my reality with their fantasy (or was it the other way around?), a marriage of their inspiration with my awe. Then I heard this from my life professor: Somebody told her the immersion is more fulfilled by a sense of touch, drawing an open palm over the pages, feeling the texture of the newsprint. What fetish! My psychology professor in college said that our "ends" have the greatest feelings because they have the greatest concentration of nerves. Now I do believe l.p. when she said, Feel them stories, learn the plot thru an open palm.

- Poet Belle was right when she said that poems should be read aloud. There is no other way, I insist, damned be the listeners if they didn't like our squeaky voices, it is in the poet's pen and not in the reader's vocal chords that one poem is judged versus the next.

- Greek plays are read like no other. When you watch a Greek tragedy on stage, you notice a stark difference between the protagonists and the chorus; the former are elevated. There is, of course, a "dramatic" reason here, essentially "tragic", and that is this: the protagonists are bigger than life while the chorus are like you and me; the former's physical elevation are made possible by the high footwear they are made to sport while the chorus people are barefoot. Translate this to reading: When you read the part of the protagonists, the volume should be made louder, remembering that they are bigger, louder than us mortals.

Lesson Two: On Gaining Wisdom

L.P. told me there is a difference between gaining knowledge and gaining wisdom, one being quantity, the other, quality. That true? There was this short story (I forgot the names of the title/author) where the father-in-law of the lead character, an avid reader of books, was said to have worshipped nothing else but knowledge. He practiced no faith but he did not doubt the book's ability to enrich him. He was supposed to have a bookstore called A Place of Worship. Hmmm, knowledgeable or wise? Quantity or quality?


Lesson Three: Reading won't hurt. Read the writings on the wall, let Sir J read your thoughts, read B's poems, Ma'am J's short stories, by reading we gain experience, read this blog, read between the lines, read my lips, read.

And what are you reading now?

THE MOVIE IN MY MIND

...the dreams we left behind, a scene I can't erase...oh boy, this could only be Isay Alvarez belting her signature angst, a la Gigi in Miss Saigon, at a West End stage, but really we are talking of life here, not stage, although someone may have said, All of life is a stage; and then we're also talking of literature here, the literary dreams we're going to leave behind shortly, ha-ha, to be able to talk about, well, movies, even if someone may have said too, Actors and actresses are bigger than life, such hullabaloo, this praise, as foolish as Gigi drooling over a strong G.I.'s embrace. But hey, hey, my, my, the movies are really in my mind, so let's talk 'em, here, here, now, now.

THE DARK SIDE OF THE OZ - Did you hear this yet? If you played Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon cd side by side with a muted The Wizard of Oz vhs/dvd, you will think that the cd was exclusively created for the movie, that each song, in order, perfectly coincided with each scene.

COOL AND THE GAFFE - In Pulp Fiction's first scene, Tim Roth and Amanada Plummer were honey-bunnying each other in a restaurant prior to a planned stick-up, and when the plan came about, she stood atop the table and made the announcement: Any of you f***in' pr*cks move and I'll execute every motherf***in' last one of you...yadda, yadda, yadda...!!! This scene was repeated, close to the end of the movie (though not in real time because, I believe, there was no real time there) but if you listened very closely, the lines uttered by Plummer to announce the stick-up this time around were slightly different. Did Tarantino goof? Or was he just cool and deliberately goofed it to express his cool?

WATCH OUT, IT'S COLD, IT'S RED - In the Sixth Sense, everytime a scene depicts a cold climate, like smoke coming out someone's mouth, or mercury dropping, a ghost will soon appear. M. Night also made red the color of nasty; everytime an object prominently in red is shown, something nasty happens subsequently.

WHO IS KEYSER SOZE? - Want a clue? How about the initials, K.S., as in Kevin Spacey.

THROUGH THE EYES OF A CHILD - Most, if not all, of Steven Spielberg's movies have child characters, disporting his affinity for children. In E.T., he took another mile. Most of the scenes were taken from a kid's eye level, as if they hired a child for a cameraman, probably emphasizing what did not need to be: be childlike when seeing the film.

ONE REASON TO SEE IT AGAIN - In Indiana Jones and The Ark of the Covenant, R2-D2 made a special appearance, as a cave drawing.

THE TRAMP DID NOT HAVE A ROMP - Charlie Chaplin once joined a Charlie Chaplin look alike contest. He placed third, not bad.

TRANSITIONs - Four movies are said to be better than the great books they were adapted from: The Godfather, A Clockwork Orange, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and Gone With The Wind. I can think of one movie that is definitely better than the book, which is lousy: Bridges Of Madison County.

FINALLY, THE 10 MOVIES ALWAYS IN MY MIND

1. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles)
2. City Lights (Charlie Chaplin)
3. Aguila (Eddie Romero)
4. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino)
5. Blood Simple (Coen Brothers)
6. Brazil (Terry Gilliam)
7. Philadelphia (Jonathan Demme)
8. Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley)
9. The Bicycle Thief (Vittorio de Sica)
10. Do The Right Thing (Spike Lee)

Now, let me gather from my friends, the envelope please...

F.P. 101 (cont.)

II. Anatomy of Fascination

I'm so full of feeling
I can easily believe
I must be sentimental
But when I mull this over,
I see it's all in thought,
I felt nothing whatever

All of us alive spend
One life in living it,
Another, thinking it.
And the only life we have
Is split between
The true one and the false.

But which is true
And which is false
No one can explain.
And as we go on living,
The life we spend's the one
That's doomed to thinking.
- Fernando Pessoa
I'm So Full Of Feeling


I was a kid when I heard this story about Bobby Fisher, arguably the greatest chess player in history. Fisher, according to the story, trained himself for important matches by playing against himself. Himself. Bobby Fisher playing white against Bobby Fisher playing black. The rationale was that he wanted to train against somebody equal, if not better, than him to be able to reach greater heights, and to him that other person was nobody but himself.

To many people, Bobby Fisher was just full of himself. To me, he was like Fernando Pessoa, so full of feelings. But of course Pessoa was not the Fisher of literature (the latter came to the world much later). I mean he could be, plus more.

And that more is this: Pessoa was a four-in-one poet, a multiplex artist of labyrinthine structures spewing labyrinthine expressions. When great writers had pseudonymns, Pessoa had heteronyms - dramatis personaes who existed outside of himself, alter egos with their own egos - each one gaining a following. His heteronyms were poets in themselves, everyone bestowed not only with a name but personality, physical attributes, religion, birthdate, writing syle, and school of thought.

There was Alvaro de Campos, a Jewish world traveller born on Oct. 15, 1890 at 1:30 p.m., naval engineer, dynamic, and free-spirited. His words, his thoughts...

Yes, yes, yes...nail me to your sea ventures
And my shoulders will love the weight of the cross!

Do what you want with me,
so long as it's done at sea,
On deck, to the sound of the waves.
Wound me, kill me, tear me apart!
What I'd like is to bring to Death
A soul spilling over with the Sea.

And then there was Ricardo Reis, born in 1887, a doctor who lived in exile in Brazil, Whitman-inspired, neoclassical, isolated, a constant searcher. Let us give audience to his loneliness...

I'm beginning to know myself. I don't exist.
In the space between what I'd like to be and
what others made of me.
Or half that space, because there's life there too...
So that's what I finally am...
Turn off the light, close the door, stop shuffling
your slippers out there in the hall.
Just let me be at ease and all by myself in my room.
It's a cheap world.

And still there was Alberto Caeiro, born in 1889, died in 1915, he had no profession nor education, he was a pastoralist, an almost innocent man living in the country. He, too had some melancholic things to say...

I have no philosophy: I have senses...
If I speak of nature, it's not because I know what Nature is,
But because I love it, and that's why I love it,
For a lover never knows what he loves,
Why he loves or what love is...
Love is eternal innocence,
And the only innocence is not to think.

And finally, there's Bernardo Soares, a great writer of prose, not really a heteronym but more of Pessoa himself, to whom The Book of Disquiet was attributed, and who Richard Zenith described as "a mutilated Pessoa, with missing parts." Hear, then...

All literature is an attempt to make life real. As all of us know, even when we don't act on what we know, life is absolutely unreal in its directly real form; the country, the city and our ideas are all absolutely fictitious things, the offspring of our complex sensation of our own selves. Impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literary.

What words, I am fascinated! And my fascination becomes a retort to how Pessoa described The Book of Disquiet: as his cowardice. Hear me now, sir, with all my literary pleasure...

You are my bravery.

FERNANDO PESSOA 101

I. Anatomy of Initiation

Freezing fire. Scorching ice.

My initiation to Fernando Pessoa, Portugal's national artist (or shouldn't we say Portugal's national art?), was established on contradictions - of terms, of feelings, of essences - that were as haunting as a beautiful nightmare and as troubling as a scary daydream. The first time I tested his literary waters, they were very, very cold, yet somehow, somewhere, there was a transition where I was smelted by extreme heat and, as cast iron, was shaped by the sometimes strong, sometimes gentle, arms of this engaging blacksmith.

Don't just read. Feel his words; for once be a literary masochist and suffer the highest blessings of literary torment, of language enclosed in passion but captioned in irony.

I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing; it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.
- Text 152, The Book of Disquiet

MY GENDER; MY PRONOUN
(for Ghost, who was once convinced
I was a woman)

my sexuality is masculine
my intuition is feminine
my sensitivity is both gender
my sensibility is not either

in that respect...

i am in large part a he
in a small measure could be a she
but in referring to me, for accuracy
might as well use they, really.

THE MAGICAL LITANY OF AN
ACCIDENTAL BLOGGER

I make history of what I hear,
treachery of what I see.
I brew temples out of my dreams,
ceremonies out of my pain.

I create symbols of failures
and presages of disdain.

I am a magician in contempt.
Come and be inspired.

A FLYER'S DREAM

Up with me! Up with me, into the sky!
- William Wordsworth

I woke. Who clouded over the
magic windows of my dream?
- Antonio Machado


I dream of flying.

When I was a kid, I was a huge flyer-dreamer. I spent many a moments in many a summers on our rooftop, by my lonesome, pretending to fly. My aspiration to fly was all-encompassing, all-sweeping. In my childhood, flying was my sovereign and a flyer was my philosopher-king.

It did not matter to me if wings were physically my own, as enormous feathered ligaments and bones protruding from my narrow back, or as enormous steel attached to a craft that I myself maneuvered to fly. As long as I was part of the skies, going up, going down, going up with the wind at my whim, the manner by which I flew did not matter.

But despite the dreams of my innocence, I lived with my reality and found contentment with my small arms in lieu of wings. At times, I fluttered them in slo-mo fashion, imitating a hawk; other times, I held them stiff and straight, gliding and wheee-wheeeeinngg to the image of a fighter plane. And everytime a real plane flew by, I stood straight at attention while screaming in delight, "You go, sir, you go", then followed it up with a snappy salute as an act of endearment, my sign of respect, a request for altitude, an innocuous prayer for safety. I beamed in pride while they entered into the realm of the clouds, and just as soon I would come back to my wheee-wheeeeing, soaring and paratrooping, high and mighty, (translate: the height of our house, the might of our roof).

I was a real flyer, too. A good one. Many times I flew in expertise this formidable kite called boca-boca, and discriminating as I was, I only picked the industrial-strength materials in building this kite: grade 2 paper, my mom's pool of thread para ganchillo, and cutout newspaper for tail. Really formidable. Myself and my kite were formidable partners in the sky, ingenious and indigenous, respectively, and those moments were my stepping stones to the promise of my dreams.

A couple of years ago, I tried to re-live that dream. My co-worker C introduced me to her hubby E, an interesting person with interesting features (dark skin, green eyes) when I voiced out my intention to learn how to fly. E was a flight instructor, and I thought he was a good match because he did not seem to have the cold quality of a commercial pilot. The couple became my good friends and everytime they went island-hopping, to deliver newspapers and whatnot, they asked me for company. One time E took me to a flight simulator to assess my pilot vision, in the figurative sense, and what transpired crashed me, in the literal sense. In five attempts, my plane did not go past the control tower and I went down. I probably did all types of crash-landings, belly, nose..., I half-expected the lights to go flashing like when you hit the jackpot in a casino.

"Angle of attack, angle of attack", E would scream, asking me to lift the nose to an angle for proper lift-off. "How?", I asked, rattled by the presence of all these instruments in front of me.

"But I wanted to enjoy the view from the window", I pleaded to E everytime I failed to pay attention to the stupid gadgets. "In flying", he told me in exasperation, "you did not even need to look out the window because all of these instruments in front of you will take care of the job. A cockpit did not even need a window."

"What?" I asked in amazement, "now where is the beauty of flying then?"

And so he taught me the basic rudiments of flying, the basic functions of the gadgets. Altimeters. Tachometers. Altitude indicators. Voltmeters. Loadmeters.

Their functions? I couldn't care less.

"Full throttle..." Yawn. "Hydraulic pressure..." Yawn. "Vertical speed..." Yawn some more. "Clear for take-off..." Clear my yawn.

Now, I still dream of flying. Did you say "Taxi into position"? Ow, c'mon.

I really meant: I dream of flying my kite.