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Thursday, November 27, 2003

AND THEN WE SPEAK OF RIVERS

They say: a city's greatness is provided by the presence of three things - a great museum, a great library, and a great river. We may consider: London has The Natural History Museum, The British Library, and Thames; Paris has The Louvre, National Library, and Seine; St. Petersburg has The Hermitage, Russian National Library, and Neva; New York has The Met, NYPL, and Hudson; and, Washington D.C. has The Smithsonian, Library of Congress, and Potomac.

I say: If we examined very, very closely, we will realize that any city's (or town's) inherent need is not a library with its wide catalogue of titles or a museum with its permanent collection of arts but one which Henry van Dyke considered the most human and companionable of all inanimate things: a river.

My earliest recollection of a river's good fellowship was when the family visited a town in Northern Philippines where my dad was originally from. The place was fantastic. It was surrounded by mountains and fruit-bearing trees, my aunt's house was a wonderful nipa hut - a castle of kindness and a pure home by whatever standard - and right across it was that great inanimate thing.

I was already then a water-freak and in no time, with all opportunities, just after we settled our luggage, I did the inevitable and claimed the whole river as mine. I canvassed. It was a narrow but long stretch of flowing water, tummy deep, with the stream probably coming down from the mountain ranges and probably ending up in some sea - which in all probability stayed there until sucked by the sun, I really did not care because what was important was that the river was mine. So I jumped, butt naked, boy that was cool, the river I mean.

A couple of hours, my mom screamed, lunch's ready young man!, but I ignored her, by golly I ignored my mom's maternal invitation, something I rarely did and do, I ignored a bucketful of fried dalag and chopped tomatoes and unsoy, but the magic of the river water lulled me into a true sense of juvenile snobbery. Rivers, after all, were my favorite body of water and I became the most me whenever immersed in the goodwill of this my streaming, flirting paramour.

I vividly remember. I was like Huck Finn or Li'l Abner, the river claiming and covering me from the neck down while my li'l proud head was resting on a rock, ahhh heaven, when all of a sudden my uncle appeared and with sublime authority and a gesturing thumb placed the mandate, in a voice giving no options: you're times up, out you go! And there, in front of my crossing eyes, a host of bulls, carabaos delight, man oh man, they must number about 5 or 6, and right there and then I learned my great lesson for the day, rivers are for everyone, human or otherwise.

The flow of the river is ceaseless and its water is never the same. The bubbles that flow in the pools, now finishing, now forming, are not of long duration: so in the world are man and his dwellings...People die in the morning, they are born in the evening, like foam on the water.
- Kamo no Chomei
Hojoki (An Account
of My Hut)


I like rivers, their character, their color, the sound they make, hey I even like the sound of the word 'river' - with a little roll of the tongue, the stretching of the mouth on the first syllable, the pouting on the second, the sound suffusing a clear sense of authority, a certain degree of eccentricity. I like the name River, as in River Phoenix, and I used to wonder if the intensity of his acting had something to do with the name given him. I love touring the river, reading books about river journeys, and most of all, I give my attention to the politics of the river.

I hate all dams, large and small...
If you are against a dam, you are for a river.
- David R. Brower


We bathe in the river, wash in the river, get our food from the river. The river gives us hymns, poets are inspired by the river, saints are blessed in the river, we dance to the tune of the river.

In the movie Sabrina, Julia Ormond was telling Harrison Ford that the nicest thing to do in Paris was walk the streets and listen to the voice of The Seine. He asked her, what was it saying? And she responded, it is only between you and the river.

It is now between you and me. The rivers speak of us. The rivers are us.

And what is your take on rivers?

Thursday, November 20, 2003

the benediction of quintessence:
a birthday ode to the
marshall of my wakefulness


i long to cradle
in the solitude of my sleep
the sweetness of your conviction
the gentility of your strength

so when I rise up
to an urgent sense of mystery
you'll be the shaper of my experience
the angel of my certainty

Monday, November 17, 2003

(INTERMISSION

cbs' slammed book, for heaven's sake...

I. Personal

name: cbs
nicknames: c, or b, or s, but never bs
location: west
retention: east
cultural assimilation: north
literary indoctrination: south
birthday: wednesday, i think
birthplace: manila, i'm positive
birthmarks: a few moles
favorite birthmark: mole on left wrist, it's a she, her name is anna. it is a she because it changes appearance very often.

II. Terseonal

age: yucky
sex: yummy
10 yrs. ago: yuppie
will never be caught listening to: yanni
love to do now: make yari
intellectual?: kunyari

III. Testosteronal

physical status: caressed
civil status: blessed
mental status: distressed
emotional status: regressed
financial status: hard-pressed
stanley status: suppressed
clothes status: well-pressed
love for women: expressed
attitude towards smart women: impressed
done to me: undressed
so far not done to me: andressed
done to my coffee: espressed
needed done to this entry: eresd)

Saturday, November 15, 2003

FIRST, LET'S TALK ABOUT WATER

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and the darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moves upon the face of the waters...

Genesis 1:1

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.
- Loren Eisley
The Immense Journey

Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
- Robert Frost
Directive


I remember watching a magician's performance on tv where the magic tricks proved to be ultimately engaging due to the delightful use by the magician of life's major elements - air, fire, and water - as magical themes. Of the three elements, his acts with water were most popular with the audience for reasons I considered as obvious: air, being an invisible element, deprived the spectators of a logical connection between subject and tricks; and, fire, being a symbolically evil element, deprived the spectators of a more appreciative connection between subject and tricks. Water, on the other hand, is both visually and spiritually accessible and alluring, even to kids, that all movements, all boosts, emanating from and between subject and tricks were pursued by a collective scrutiny that was eventually captivated.

The magician's watery tricks left no room to a cynic's prying estimation; they were not only air tight - (hah, now that's unseen!), they were also crudely entertaining. Consider: first, the magician was shown holding a pigeon; then he clasped his hands together as in a prayer, confining the pigeon and holding it from view; then slowly he released the clasp and each hand was magically cupping a spurting water that arced like little fountains, the spurts taking center stage in lieu of a disintegrated, and probably disgruntled, bird; and finally he juggled the spurts between his hands as if saying, look ma no spill, no mess - and who knows, there were probably no wet magician's hands even, for crying out loud!

The magician's tricks need not be seen nor told for us to finally regard the true potency of Loren Eisley's statement: water is magical. And since I thirst for philosophy as much as I do for water, I can even toast a glassfull in its own flowing honor and in a fluid fashion declare in a flash: water, holy or not, spells power!

In M. Night Shyamalan's movie Unbreakable, Bruce Willis' character had superhuman qualities burdened by his own superman's kryptonite: water. He never got sick for a prolonged period of time and was sensationally able to carry tons of objects many times his body weight, but a good amount of water poured over his body converted his superhuman energy into the same muscle potential of a rag doll. In one climactic scene, he was pursuing a criminal with valiant intensity until he fell into a swimming pool that abruptly coursed his saviour persona to a sub-zero, sub-hero level.

Water, odorless and colorless, is not sock-less when the issue is saving mankind. But parenthetically, like in the case of the fictional Bruce Willis character, it can kill, too. I know the feeling. I am strong, myself, and honestly athletic. But water, specifically rainwater, is my own personal waterloo, (or should I say rainwaterloo?)

Ahhhh, rainwater. I remember my childhood moments where my version of "Give me a piece of earth and I shall move the world" pointed to the small radius that was the direct vertical hit of rainwater sploshing from the downspout. Nobody, but nobody, could have found courage to stay on that spot when it rained hard; the place was my castle, the rainwater from the downspout was my bath-servant.

That was then, this is now. It must have been karma that slowed my resistance and nature was currently telling me, "Son, your time is up, your throne is up - for grabs. Somebody has got to be the new rain king." And so now, this is what afflicts me. I am plagued with an allergy to rainwater and the bodily reaction to getting slightly rain-soaked is swift and severe. Did I spell pneumonia correctly?

But rainwater is not all bad for me. My sense of hearing loves it; the sound of rain lulls my insomniac head to sleep, there's no need to count sheep. Rain saves me a good amount of time; through the clouds' cooperation there is no need to water my plants, my ferns, the trees, the greens, and even the wheels, too.

Maybe I should consider water as my pharmacopoeia, my poison on one side, my antidote on another, and bring my attitude towards it to a whole new level of respect.
'And on that note', (the way lp fondly states as attribute to parting words), let me repeat without claiming as mine what my high school teacher once said in our science class: that the amount of earth's water is the same for all time, taking into consideration the process of evaporation and condensation and that the clouds and the atmosphere from part of this planet. That lesson was way too cool. It could mean, as I now realize and scream my own eureka! - I may have bathed in the recycled sweat of the puissant Cleopatra while you may have done the bottoms up on the recycled piss of the deplorable Atilla the Hun. Kampai!

Saturday, November 08, 2003

A CACHE OF THINGS TO BLOG ABOUT

While I was still in the Philippines and doing a column for this national publication, my editor gave me a precious piece of advice which, like most truths, endures all the elements of the moment, all the tests of time. The advice was pretty simple; in fact it was this simplicity that engenders our snobbish writers' noses to develop further attitude to ignore it: mental block is a writer's worst enemy and the only way to give it a good fight is to be prepared up front; preparing up front means establishing a reservoir, a bank, a fund, a cache of topics that the writer may have to write now or in the future; and, establishing a reservoir is commonly achieved by jotting down interesting things seen, heard, felt and experienced where, from there, the development of the interest comes easy, and becomes easygoing.

John d' Agata, gifted editor of the book The Next American Essay, made sure his writer's nose was not snobbish and came prepared - up front - to face the harshness not of the future but of the present, and prepared not only to write but to do, and so in the anthologies' final pages this heading makes up for his own Preparation H...

Epilogue: Things To Do Today

The things he were to do that day were one short of a hundred, but they can even be fifty short of a hundred, mind you, and my mind would still have been blown the same old-fashioned way, slowly but surely. Of the ninety-nine, fourteen were my choices, not choices for him or to whoever to really do and accomplish the things committed to be done, but choices for the way they have been arrogantly thought about. Arrogant because they blew my mind, arrogant because they put on published paper the evidence that blew my mind. My choices:

10. organize and dispense an imperceptible the
11. perfect the ground
19. determine the cause of the cause
30. make a list of things to do in case of consenting adults
48. refuse to pay the suggested amount
53. clarify a morning posture
58. postpone, for as long as possible, moving in to the sentence that is never not under construction
66. confine the untoward
75. rehabilitate the truth tellers
77. practice saying something
81. lance and drain the churches
82. define the decease
87. mimic the open area
93. weep new syllables

At this juncture I will not abuse the style - bless your heart Jetardi for saying that once - but I will show that world that Be Prepared is also the code of this old Blog Scout, yes, sir! no sir! (Hokay, as you were.) And so I came up with these...

Things To Blog About, Now Or In The Future, Till Blogging Is Easy, And The Mind Is Hard To Get:

1. james joyce freakin' finnegan's wake
2. my love affair with the river
3. cbs' slammed book
4. love, actually
5. do i care about quentin?
6. a 4:00 am experience with marcel proust's remembrance of things past and myers' cavatina
7. the kingdom of this world, damn you sir alejo, why are you so good
8. of libraries and museums, an a.g.o. experience
9. an attempt, a sorrowful attempt, to translate the sublime poetry of jetardi and jobertvi and bellena and freuda and angela from the english to the portuguese, even if the use of the article the is offensive to my ear, even if these authors did not authorize me to make the translation which i cannot possibly accomplish anyway, let keik be darned! darned.
10. i remember larry sipin
11. i should really halt this bloggin' feelin', cause right now i'm proficiently drunkin...

hik

Saturday, November 01, 2003

PART II. THE BEAM IN MY MIND

Only the imagination is real.
- William Carlos Williams


And now?
Greedily as one we slurp these things down
we eat each other up
we eat knives saucers plates
we eat lamps tables chairs
we eat men women things.

- Theo van Duesburg


Surreal. Those words were probably Williams' and van Duesburg's take on being surreal. To which we beg the question: Which is stranger - fact or fiction, life or literature, surreality or surrealism?

Surreal. My focus goes surreal, running counter-clockwise; I now see Dali's paintings of flying giant eyelashes as truth, and my books and computer and keyboard and this blog as spurious; I am spurious, furious, curious; Who am I? Who are you? Am I you? Are you me? Are you mayumi? Are you you? Where am I? Am I here? Are you there? Are we there? Are we there yet? Am I typing this now? Is this this? Is this that? Is this thisthat? Or is that thatthis?

Surreal, the beam is in my mind. I don't have the capacity, much less the audacity, to talk about things I only have faint knowledge of; wherefore may I give the floor to Surrealism's Founding Father, the one and only Andre' Breton, be careful sir, lest you slip and fall and knock your surreal head off that polished and shiny floor.

A tres, tres blurry existence to one and all, you interesting bloggers. My name is Andre' Breton, a dead Parisian, and to all the unitiated out there, here is my manifesto.

Surrealism: (n) psychic automatism in its pure state by which one proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word or in any other manner - the actual functioning of thought; it is a nonrational significance of imagery arrived at by the exploitation of chance effects or unexpected juxtapositions.

Surrealism, like Marxism, is a movement - a movement of revolt. But while Marxism's revolt is "only" against the ruling class in a capitalist state, Surrealism's adversary is reason itself, nothing is grander, you tell me dat!

Surrealists believe that the mind, in the attainment of reality, should be liberated from logic and all moral and aesthetic concerns. It is our great aim to reach that certain point, that certain plane, in the mind where beyond realism you and I will attain a new knowledge, and on this score we vow to develop the non-logical - rather than illogical - essence of our works so that the results represent the operation of the great unconscious.

In a classical sense, surrealism is a philosophy as it seeks to discover the mysteries of life; adroitly, it is based on the belief that our dreams are omnipotent and should be harnessed by way of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis and interpretation. We are interested in the study and effects of dreams and hallucinations as well as in the interpretation of the sleeping and waking conditions in the threshold of the conscious mind.

But to really understand the inner conveyance of a Surrealist, you may need to understand our precursors, the Paris' Dadaists, from the Dada in Paris, distinguished from de-doo-doo-doo, de-da-da-da of London's Police, that's all I want to say to you...

Dada was the work of poets who saw in poetry a liberating gesture setting it apart from ordinary Art. Liberate yourself by figuring out how a Dada work works; see this piece of a great Dadaist and analyze it as a manual, as a poem, as a poetic manual or whatever, and then you decide if Dada deserved to be endangered like a dodo.

To Make A Dadaist Poem
by: Tristan Tzara

- take a newspaper
- take some scissors
- Choose from this paper an
article of length you want
to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of
the words that make up this
article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting
one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the
order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.


I, cbs, neither a Dadaist nor Surrealist but an avid follower of experimental art like a veritable uto-uto, treated this poem as a manual and in the process came up with the piece, arrived at by following the steps mentioned above, the chosen newspaper article being found in page B17 of the 11/1/03 issue of The New York Times with this harmless heading: Lights To Return To East River Bridges - and now this piece, if it were really my piece, taken from the final two paragraphs of that article, I lengthily entitled:

This Is Not A Poem, This Is Not My Poem
If This Were A Poem, It Could Not Be Me
Or Could It? Oh Come O'En!

said River Brooklyn special
Representatives bridges the magic
O'Keefe for of the
the of now to connection
cafe they owner has felt
businesses the the the
back bridge New York
jewel its Michael said a.


To recap, from Paris Dada came the Surrealists to form a movement based on principles of consciousness and politics. The aim is nothing more nor less than to challenge and overturn logic and to express in art and literature the workings of the unconscious mind and to synthesize these workings with the conscious mind. The technical objective of Surrealism is to penetrate the deepest layers of the mind and in pursuit of this goal I conceptualized the secrets of the magical surrealist art.

- First, settle yourself;
- Have writing materials ready;
- Concentrate;
- Put yourself in a passive or receptive state of mind;
- Write quickly without any preconceived subject;
- Write quickly so as not to retain or be tempted to reread what you wrote;
- I assure you the first sentence will come of itself naturally;
- Thereafter, a phrase foreign to your consciousness will come out every second;

This, my friends, is The Surrealist Game.

Anything goes.



I drink my mountain rhine, I sit alone, it is 12:39 am and I am by my lonesome, football is dead, my team is dead, coincidentally it is the day of the dead and I have not lit the candles yet as I promised, I promised for my dead. My head is spinning but despite its spinning I think of you my sweet, I think of your ying, I think of your yang, I think of your Jung, your young, you are young, but my concern right now is this: did I spell conscientiously correct?

belle
jobert
jet
freude
ghost
anne
angela
rk
kengkeng
dosn't matter

you all do matter, thanks, thanks, thanks, this is it. This is it! I look forward to the next.

Right now I can't breathe and I don't want to light a candle for my breath.

Boink.