AN INVITATION TO SURREALISM

PART I. THE BEAM IN MY EYES

I did a link hop one time, surfing and jumping from one blog to another, and was surprised to find the phrase "feeling surreal" as a seemingly prevailing part of a typical blogger's daily life. Of course I did not believe that "feeling surreal" is casual (we might as well take the sur out of the term, but then again what would "feeling real" mean?) - but the frequent usages made me wonder if the hallucinatory or dreamlike sequences characterizing these non-rational experiences were somehow alcohol or chemical induced.

Perhaps the phrase-usages were an exaggeration, made in reference to encounters that were above the ordinary but not unreal, or palpably pointed to encounters which occurred in a state of changing-of-the-guards between the conscious and subconscious mind - as in a case of half-sleep (or half-wakefulness if you're an optimist, ha-ha) that is definitely very casual and common.

But whatever, surreal moments, damn be the way we define them, are alive and kicking in this surreal world and waiting in the wings to be experienced. They do not just belong to the sombre subjects of the arts or to the tortuous themes of literature, but, if you ask me, they are here and now, there and then, in life and in liberty, till death do us part baby!

On a more serious, personal note, it must be the beam in my eyes, not the muta that mutate in them while I was in a state of half-sleep (so I'm a pessimist, huh?) that helped me define surrealism in my own waking hours - two freakin' surreal incidents to be exact - which I swear happened to me without those hallucinatory moments being alcohol influenced, excuse' moi!

The first surreal incident happened inside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Amsterdam Ave. at 112th Street one spring. The biggest gothic cathedral in the world - it has the length of two football fields and the height of a 17 storey-building - overawed me with its incredible dimension and by its fresh and amazing inter-faith approach, but the actual surreal moment came when I decided to walk around and eyeball the little chambers and little chapels set up around the Cathedral. As I walked towards the chapel that was closest to the Cathedral's enormous altar, I noticed that a Mass was then ongoing inside that tiny chapel. I stood by the door of the chapel and my photographer's instinct saw a fantastic photo-op: the priest in full priest's garb - alb, cincture, stole and chasuble - holding aloft a chalice, and the four congregants facing the chapel altar and looking upwards in prayer. As soon as I hit the shutter, the priest turned around; at that precise moment we were perfectly aligned, from point to point, from priest to photographer, in a straight line. The priest looked directly at me because we were at each other's direct visual path. I froze and in a split second I thought I noticed the sunrays coming out of the stained glass by the altar multiplying in rapid succession. My heartbeat stopped and I felt I rose slowly, like a rising smoke, and my head became very light. I got back to my senses when my companion signalled for us to go. I recalled the incident later on and blamed my disorientation to a couple of reasons: I freaked out after I took the photograph and the priest turned around, thinking I would be berrated and humiliated for unconscionably intruding into their holy privacy; and, I freaked out even more when I discovered the priest to be a woman.

The second surreal incident was when I attended the funeral of the mother of my very close friends about a year ago. Prior to the funeral, I have not seen these close friends of mine - brothers and sisters - as well as their parents, and their friends, and their parents' friends - who were also my good friends, for 10-15 years. Of course when you have not seen somebody this long, not even in pictures, the image you have of him/her will have to be the one when you saw him/her the last time. That was the case with these people. Though we frequently e-mailed each other, I had no update on their appearances. Thus, when I entered the Church to pay my final respects, the feeling was absolutely absurd: while walking along the aisle and towards the casket, I felt like I was walking in slow-motion and the atmosphere inside seemed hazy. Everytime I looked around, I would see somebody I vaguely knew and slowly realized who they were: the ex-athletic A who was bulging in the middle; the ex-big-haired B who was struggling to keep the last remaining strands of hair on his head; the ex-blacksheep C who appeared sharp and dignified; the ex-baby D who was carrying a baby herself; and the ex-ever hospitable E who treated me as his son and always served me my favorite pulutan everytime I came to their house, but at that moment no thanks to old age he no longer remembered me. I felt like there was a void in time and I jumped 15 years into the future. It was like being in a sea of people I very well knew, but did not really know.

Seriously surreal, surreally.

SONGS OF THE EARTH

"Sing in me, Muses, and through me tell the story."

So goes the first line of the epic poem The Odyssey by Homer, in Robert Fitzgerald's translation, delivered in strict confidentiality, beyond the dictates of chronology. Here in The Telemachy the hero Odysseus was already free from an adventure with Calypso, but we did not know yet - probably we did not understand yet - that beyond the scheme of that poetic first line was the greatest adventure in literary history. We were simply caught by the lyrical spirit of this great first line and from then on we were enticed to follow the route of the next thousand lines.

What are there in words, what are there in phrases, that beyond our understanding of their meanings command our respect to the resonance of theirs sounds? We may tell somebody, "Stop!", and even if he did not know it from "Go!" he will freeze, even for a second, because the quality of our expression more than the etymology of the term did the work for us. I may call it the art of the sound, as time and again I myself stopped and listened, or stopped and read, when I heard or saw lines or sentences that swept me off my feet due to the sing-song quality of their sound. And in literature, nowhere is this more true than in poetry.

In The Vintage Book Of Contemporary World Poetry, editor J.D. McClatchy mentioned about the NASA project in 1977 where, inside the Voyager that was launched into outer space, there was a recording of different earthly sounds which in a way may enable to explain our civilization and showcase our thoughts and our feelings to an extraterrestrial civilization that may encounter it. Included in that recording were spoken greetings in 60 languages plus other random sounds that express the diversity of our life: rain, whales, heartbeats, train whistles, fire, laughter, music by Bach and Stravinsky, a Javanese gamelan, an Indian raga and a Japanese skakuhachi.

NASA could very well have enveloped all these sounds with the words of Homer, through Fitzgerald, "Sing in me, Muses, and through me tell a story", as all those sounds in collectivity tell of an earthly story, Hey Mr. E.T. there is an earth out there, there is another form of life out there, come, listen to this recording and discover our difference...

In all its plenary intent, the book's inclusion of the NASA story was simply to parallelize it with a collection of poems from different parts of the world - our world - and echo it to the people - our people - that there are different and diverse sounds from out of every corner of this planet that tells us, through their sing-song quality, to stop! and take a moment to listen to "the guardians of memory...of whispered, perplexing, gorgeous, keening, bemused, thoughtful, angry, soaring voices...the songs of the earth."

And on this transcendent score may it be my pleasure, dear friends, to introduce to you in the same serene pattern I was interposed to it, a flokloric song/poetry from a relatively unknown culture in A Country Of A Thousand Cultures known as The Philippines, this culture being lived and loved in the hinterlands, in a province so tightly-knit its people could have been all relatives by blood...strongly impressing that the song is sung by any one native to another, brother to sister to brother, of which I took the liberty to translate to my native Tagalog, as well as in English, for whatever purpose they may serve.

Wherefore, from that beautiful part of the world come these venerable lines that bear confirmation, in all its humility, as a legitimate song of the earth:

Ope mangke wayik
yo idduk nuera siin sikuak
pinurayan nak lamang
natayak si raddam...

Nasaan na, kapatid ko
ang pagmamahal mo noon sa akin,
At pinabayaan mo na lang akong
pumanaw sa dagit nitong kalungkutan...

Where was the love, my sibling
which you had once reserved for me,
now that you left me to perish
in the midst of this melancholy...

THE HUNT FOR RED-HOT MR. OCTOBER

Derek Jeter, NY Yankees Shortstop, is not called Mr. October for nothing. Time and again he showed during the pennant race - Major League Baseball's October to remember, the path to the World Series - who was the man and who were the boys. Funny how every October of the last 5 or so years Derek did not carry his last name, i.e., if you spelled it as Jitter; he showed consistently in each October game with the perennially contender Yanks that for some playoff reasons he became as tough as a baseball bat, as well-rounded as a, well, baseball.

But this October, I can make a case for two things: First, Derek Jeter no longer dominates October; and second, the term World Series no longer smacks of "imperialism" of the American sports capitalist.

Look at the other contenders: Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, Florida Marlins, Oakland A's. Each of them has 3 or 4 Derek Jeters: all fundamentally sound in their respective positions; all possessors of a quality offense: patience and power at the plate, speed and timing from base to base. And this is because MLB has scouted the world: Japan is more than Ichiro Suzuki; B.H. Kim proudly carries South Korea in his pitching arm; Colombia, Venezuela, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico and even Canada are represented by their their very best, scattered among the MLB teams. And this, thus, brings a strong argument for the World Series to be truly a baseball game between the world's 2 best teams.

And so may I ask, If you are a baseball fan, if you are a Major League Baseball fan, which team - this October - are you rooting for?