ALL THE NAMES

My name is Might-have-been;
I am also called No-more,
Too-late, Farewell.
-D.G. Rossetti
Sonnets from the House of Life

I named my child Ocean for that vast, mysterious shifting expanse. I named her Marissa, that's of the sea - because naming is what we do I guess. There is silliness to us.
-Carole Maso
The Names
(from Conjunctions)

The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
-Lao Tzu

William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet not only gave names to millions of babies foreseen to possess true love - Romeo and Juliet - but also provided ode to names, or the acts of naming, themselves: What's in a name? that which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet.

Ahhh, tell me, what's in a name? Why do people live for a name, work for a name, die for a name? How do parents determine their children's names? What's in a culture that sways naming in a definite way, a certain pattern?

'It's all in the name', said one movie agent, defying logic that what an actor needs to suceed is great acting. A political commentator ascribed to a lonely political truth, 'A candidate's name is a huge factor to winning an election'. And here's an equally sad, but more trivial, truth, per my friend. 'I did not win the girl I'm pursuing because I have an ugly name'. Ugly thought, that.

But the thing is, these thoughts exist and endure; as long as there are people's lives, there'll be people's names, and as long as we cannot see beyond the surface, beyond the names, the naming of names, drawing of names, casting of names, and ridiculing of names will always be a celebrated human indulgence.

Ridicule begins at home. Did I like my name? Uh, do I look screaming proud of it? ^..^ So, which name would I have preferred? I'll tell you, through this short story I wrote many years ago, entitled Tell Me A Story -

Hi. My name is Rain. That may explain a bit about my father's closeness to nature or his conceptual discernment for a son. My mother said he originally thought of Rainforest but changed his mind upon realizing its lack of universality. So he culled the first root word which represented something more mundane and powerful. As he was hoisting me over his head, my father must have boldly conjured images of myself as a monsoon capable of drenching a large part of nature's being with careening frequency - encompassing latitudes, ministering seasons.

So there. I like the name Rain, I like the name Forest (Rain Phoenix, Forest Whitaker, great names, great personalities) and I like them not just for their pleasant, gentle sound, which my ears say is important, but more so for their meanings, their significations, their symbolisms, which my mind argues to be more paramount. I especially like the name Rain, even in its Tagalog translation, Ulan, as in Ulan Sarmiento (but just don't tell me his real name which is atrocious, here I go again). The name bears thinking, bears contemplating, bears deciding, bears asking...tell me a story, about your name, about your nature, about you.

What's in a name that even Shakespeare falls victim to describing - wounded as Horatio; or that drives us to do a Virgil, So long shall your name, your honor and praises endure; or brings Stephen Benet to declare, American names, sharp names that never get fat, (fhat the wuck, what is that?)

Ahhh, names, I remember the time when I attended a baptism in the outskirts of Manila, in a tiny fishing village, my buddies and I were holding a baby in her resplendent white baby gown, petitioning the sacrament for acceptance of her soul, her self, her name to be a part of Us, and when the priest asked the mother, What is the baby's name?, she answered, Sirikit, the priest and the acolyte laughed, betraying their holy ignorance, leaving us to surmise, With this breeze from the sea, with the smell from those fish, the beloved Queen of Thailand decided not to let her nobility known.

Ahhh, names, mysterious names, glowing names, uncharacteristic names, funny names.
I once fell for my friend's show of seriousness, Hey did you know Mel Mathay's son married a girl named Sally Bugna? Wow, what a RIPoff! But life is a joke, so some jokes have life: Bembol Roco's Coco Artadi became Coco Roco, but what if she married Atoy Co without dropping her previous name? She'll be Coco Roco Co. We'll not stop there. What if she got married again, this time to Mr. Paloma without dropping the previous two names. She'll be Coco Roco Co Paloma. In college, we had a friend whose last name is Nambayan, and we laughed because his wife will be Mrs. Nambayan (without thinking that, unfairly, we ridiculed her mom already).

Oh well, what really is in a name? Why not just end it from where we begun? A rose by any name will smell as sweet. Unless it is Vietname Rose.

SALMAGUNDI

^..^ Today is Saturday, no work and no play. I went out and watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet. When the film's over I felt blown away like no work and no play can ever do. The movie's extremely complex, a fresher Vanilla Sky which, to me, is sheer nonsense. Eternal is about love and lost love, memory and lost memory, and the moral is, It is better to have loved and lost than never to have blah-blah-blah...

^..^ The movie is very literary, beginning with the title lifted from a poem by Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard, recited in the film with great diction by Kirsten Dunst (though she referred to the poet as Pope Alexander, so I laughed, confusing the old woman beside me. What's funny, eh?!):

How happy is the blameless Vestal's lot?
The world forgetting, by the world forgot:
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;

^..^ The same lines were used in that other Charlie Kaufmann great, Being John Malkovich, in a puppetry scene that was more serene and melancholic than any of the live action, worth the price of admission.

^..^ Did you know that in Mongolia fathers greet their sons by smelling their heads? My dad never smelled my head. First, because he was not Mongolian. Second, because I was never Mongolian. And third, he preferred hitting than smelling my head. I may have said it a thousand times but I had no qualms being hit by him in the head. Even as a kid, my head was big and hard and he must have been the one physically hurt by his hitting. Besides, he would have hit me harder if he smelled my head first.

^..^ i miss my dad
he missed my head
his hitting's a dud
i no longer had
no hit in the head
no dad getting red
no butter n' bread
no stories in bed...
i miss my dad

^..^ Robert N. Bolles, author of the wildly popular What Color Is Your Parachute has a simple self-imposed rule in sentence construction. In every written sentence, he puts a comma where he would have paused if that sentence were spoken. I consider that rule as logical, though logic and grammar are two different eggs in composition.

^..^ I noticed many young Filipino bloggers being hooked on Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder. I read that book when I was young, too, and was amazed how a small book could contain the history of philosophy. Later on in life I was amazed even more by Martin Amis' The Immortals which contained the history of the world, in a...short story.

^..^ The Immortals, by the way, is 1 of my 10 most favorite short stories, together with The Dead (James Joyce); Journey Back To The Source (Alejo Carpentier); The Ledge (Lawrence Sargent Hall); The Things They Carried (Tim O'Brien); Pie Dance (Molly Giles); A Country Husband (John Cheever); Everything That Rises Must Converge (Flannery O'Connor); The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Ernest Hemingway); and Jacob's Chicken (Milos Macourek).

^..^ I did not include any of Jet's short stories on my 10 but if she were on any of my list list, she'll be #1 on my Most Unassuming People In The Net.

^..^ Speaking of lists, the Book Of Lists once considered 'golden' and 'pond' as 2 of the 10 best-sounding words in English. That should then make On Golden Pond as the best-sounding film title in English.

^..^ I'll summon my memory. In that same edition, I remember reading 'I Scream, You Scream, We All scream For Ice Cream' as the stupidest song title, and McArthur Park as the stupidest song.

^..^ Ruminate.
McArthur Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it
Cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe again, Oh No!
(Oh no! talaga, gross...)

^..^ Strangest song title? Hmmm, how about Dancing On The Ceiling?

^..^ At Specs Music Store, there's a cd by Boy Katindig. At Barnes, there's a book (Dusk) by F. Sionil Jose. Did you know that 3 (?) years ago, Sionil-Jose almost won the Nobel? There was even a great commentary about him and his close brush with deserved recognition on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. I love Sionil-Jose, but honestly, Nick Joaquin is the better writer. As for Filipino writers in Tagalog, it's a toss-up between Pete Lacaba and Vim Nadera for me. (I know Nadera personally, from way back, though of course he does not know who I am who knows him and it is not necessary, for to quote another good writer in Tagalog, Dennis Aguinaldo, pusang hilaw naman, oo!)

BLOG CULTURE
(some bloggers' cultural interaction)

We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation
of life. We have language...We have affection.
- Lewis Thomas
The Medusa and the Snail

Jobert: What is culture?
A: Quite a few great definitions had been thrown in already, there's another one by Belle and most recently by APO Jim, but with a term as primordial as culture, there should be room for some more. I'll take Prof. Edward F. Said's, who considers culture two-fold, the 1st being all those practices autonomous from economic, social, and political realms and often exist in aesthetic forms and whose principal aim is to entertain; and 2nd is as a concept to keep up with the best that was thought and known, to be able to see yourself, your people, your society, and your traditions in their best lights - a society's reservoir of the best that differentiates "us" from "them".

Jobert: Is culture how humans view one another?
A: In a way, yes. Prof. Said deems the history of culture as the history of cultural borrowings, viewing culture as not just a matter of ownership but appropriations as well. Culture, he is firm to add, is not impermeable, as we see common experiences and interdependencies between different cultures. The Philippines is a good example, being the great appropriators we are. We suddenly become the American sitcom characters we watched the night before, matching their appearances, wearing their clothes, sporting their make-ups, speaking their language. Duh, Whatever.

Jobert: Is culture experience, or can culture be experienced, or is culture the product of experience?
A: I'll take Belle's pronouncement. Environment plays a huge part on how our brains develop, thus making culture - or us as a part of the greater us within the environment - a product of many factors like religion, language, art, law, morals etc. Culture is a sense of identity - ethnic, religious, communal - and it is this environment that helps us identify ourselves with the rest within that environment. That also makes culture, in a large respect, a product of experience that is very close to us, or something that surrounds us, for a sufficient period of time. If you go to Saudi Arabia today, you will notice the clash between your culture and theirs, being diametrically opposed. You may find a part of theirs offensive, as they might judge some of yours illegal. Wherefore, while you experience this foreign culture, your culture will not probably be a product of this new experience. But if you moved to Saudi Arabia at a young age when you have not yet developed a defined culture of your own, then most probably you will embrace Arabian culture. This culture will be an experience that will in itself be the product.

Jobert: Wherefore, everything is experience, or does experience transcend everything?
A: Not absolutely. Sometimes, a part of culture is produced by choice. You can find an inmate in deathrow listening to classical music, and who knows, your favorite pastor may be a grunge rock fanatic. But relative to the previous q & a, I think it sometimes occur that your culture is forced unto you. Prof. Said views certain societies that regard their cultures as protective enclosures, entailing the veneration of their own culture and divorcing it from the rest of the world. He smartly illustrated these types as those who hang a sign up their door: check your politics before you come in. In this kind of society, you have no option but to make experience everything.

Jet: Is LOTR and its minions a culture all its own?
A: Yes, all the ingredients of a great culture are there: middle-earth language, customs, beliefs, teachings, arts, weaponries, even jewelries, like the ring har-har. When I went to see the 1st episode, there was a group of teenagers wearing middle-earth costumes. That, btw, is out-and-out cultural appropriation.

Jobert: Does language mould a culture?
A: This is a very complex question and I will risk being a fool trying to answer it. But I will answer it, foolishness being my culture. First, some anecdote. In college, my prof asked me which between sex and sexuality is a broader term. I answered sex, reasoning out that while sexuality pertains only to humans, sex is participated in by animals, insects and plants as well. She said I was wrong, sexuality being of a deeper meaning, referring not just to the physical act of sex, but also to its spiritual, emotional, mental, and even cultural side. Compare this to language and culture, does language embrace culture, or does culture include language? I say language is a part of culture but at times this part could be greater than the sum. Say, a book, and what is written. The book is a work, which I consider as culture. It is a figment of substance and occupies space, held in hand. What is written is text, held in language. It is actually the text that moves us, not the book, although that text is part of that book.

Prof. Said, however, is the authority and so I bow. He said that the concept of national language is central but without the practice of national culture, that language becomes inert. In other words culture propagates that language - through folktales for example - because it is culture that organizes and sustains communal memory. In short, he disagrees with me (not literally because I doubt if he will ever read this entry) by saying that texts are not finished objects but create their own precedents through our own cultural practices.

Jet: Is blogging a culture?
A: Very much. As Belle says, there is culture among bloggers, there is a shared culture among a specific group of bloggers. Actually, the reason I think we visit each others' sites very often is because of this shared culture, our love for the arts, the cinema, the short stories, the poetries, captured by language which some expert says is not dialectical but paradoxical, resulting into this animated interplay without hearing a 3rd term, simply good or evil.

cbs: So what is the final word on all these Post Colonial Transformation/Culture and Transculture topics?
A: Here. In his book Culture and Imperialism (Vintage, 1993) Prof. Said lifted F. Fukuyama's view that the colonizer and the colonized completed its trajectory, with the West acquiring worldwide domination, thus resulting in - hold your breath - the end of history, with the West being assured of its integrity while the rest of the world remain standing, petitioning for attention. But I have something to oppose this, something from an interview made with Mahatma Gandhi. When he was asked what he thought of Western civilization, the great Gandhi replied: I believe it can be achieved.

ON JOBERT'S CULTURAL DISSERTATION

My friend Jobert ignited an explosion of exploration in the preceding entry that left me shaking my brainass (assbrain?) and scampering for safety with no acknowledged weapon but a promise to come back. Because I am me, I came back. Because I am me, I came back with nothing.

Time was when my cognition of culture was abundant; my cultural eloquence was enriched with facts and faithful to the empirical. My highpoint was in my 2nd year in college when my young life's cultural chalice brimmed with prominence. That was the schoolyear when my classmates Boy and Jun, experts in the matter of Aranque flesh, confided to me that they contracted the dreaded disease brought by some user-unfriendly virus or bacteria that danced mightily to the classic tune tumutulo giliw. Boy and Jun needed my help rather than my sympathy and so I sprayed them with my cultural thought, This is great guys, let me immortalize this day by inducting you as members of the one reputable org of our generation, the one and only... Culture Club.

Over the many years, I grasped and grappled with real life and with it came the real great guys with a real take on real culture. Selwyn Cudjoe. Frantz Fanon. Bill Ashcroft. Jay and Jet David. Belle Nabor. Charlotte (Ghost) Hornets. Freude. Ree. Ronaldo. Pele. Madonna. And of course, Jobert V.

Unlike the cultured nature of Boy and Jun (they're probably multi-cultured now, knowing their sensational compulsion) Jobert's explosion is of text that exacts mental examination, not texture that ends up in a laboratory examination, probably rendering a contemporary Mary Ladd Gavell to blurt at the moment of microscopic truth, 'Watching, I am a witness to a crisis in the life of a gonococcus'. While B/J's culture reeks, JV's seeks, invents, explores - and in his query, probably experiences. His questions are bigger than my answers, and because I am afraid, I will summon my tantrums and invoke his match. Wherefore I decided to leave for now and in my return will bring Prof. Edward Said of Columbia University, whether he knows it or not.

In lieu of my cowardice, let's give in to this fragment of Billy Shakes' Love's Labour's Lost for some station i.d.:

Moth: They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.
Costard: O! they have lived long on the almsbasket of words. I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word; for thou art not so long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier swallowed than a flap-dragon.

At this juncture I'll be an Ahnold without the accent, mark this vow as exhibit "A", I shall be back.

ON CULTURE (continuation)

The robust quality of Frantz Fanon's lines, quoted in Post-Colonial Transformation and lifted from Black Skin, White Masks, is inspiring; the allegiance is definite, the resolve powerful -

I am my own foundation. I will initiate the cycle of my freedom.

The quote matches the intensity of Archimedes' famous words, Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth, leaving us without a tinge of misunderstanding that Fanon's resolve is for the advancement of self-sufficiency and integrity, for the triumph of aspiration and action.

Ashcroft had every reason to consider those lines as exemplar to what Selwyn Cudjoe termed as resistance literature, delineated as a category of literary writing emerging as an integral part of organized struggle for national liberation. In the realm of transculture, language is the first, middle, and last line of offense, and as Ashcroft puts it better, it is in language that colonial discourse is engaged at its most strategic point.

A leader of a resistance who, in words, resolve to be his own foundation and initiate the cycle of his freedom reveals not just himself but his weapon - his language - which if true to its purpose can effectively interpellate the power of colonialism. By my standard, Fanon's words are very effective. In minimum length and maximum vigor, they prove language in general to be a potent tool in identity construction, in this case the identity of the crier, the resister. But with the heavy responsibility bestowed upon the erudite shoulders of language, Ashcroft acknowledges the supreme importance of meaning, the language's meaning, the meaning of literature that it is serving, the very centerpiece of transculture, moving him to state that radical communication, which post-colonial writing represents, could only occur if meaning is present in both reader and writer.

What then lies beneath the mystery and mastery of meaning?

Ashcroft points out that while the writer - being the source of the literature's vision and intention - has the strongest claim upon the meaning of his writing, his writing's meanings are actually attributable to existing subjects, thus negating the notion that meaning is a mental act which the author translates into words. This is corollary to the higher truth that a word does not find a meaning, it is a meaning that actually finds its word, and to my mind Ashcroft is simply saying in this context that the writer is just at par with the reader.

This, of course, is based on the assumption that the writer is saying something meanable, which makes up for the next logical question - How can meanability be assured?

Here is where Ashcroft gets analytical, referring to the relationship between the writer and reader where each performs a function and pursues a goal, the presence of such relationship being crucial in a situation of discourse as it signifies the space within which the writer meets the act of reading. To him, it is important for the writer and reader to be present at the other's act of reading and writing, explaining the time/space machination in this wise: a) a reader may be present in the writing at a conscious level in the author's sense of an audience ; and b) a writer may be present in the reading at a conscious level when the reader accepts the convention that the author is telling him or her something through the text.

One of my best newspaper-reading experiences must have been on account of this relationship. It happened in the Philippines many years ago, the medium being the Philippine Daily Inquirer, and the writer being Carolyn Arguillas. This writer, the PDI's Chief of Mindanao Bureau, wrote a twice-a-week op-ed column in English about slice of life in Southern Philippines where she was from. One morning Arguillas stunned a nation breakfasting on coffee con Philippine Daily Inquirer through her column which proudly appeared in Sogboanon, a Southern language, her native language. I read the entire column, hook, line and sinker, and I swear was uplifted by my reading, hook, line, and sinker - even though I did not, do not, speak a word of Sogboanon. By fulfilling her writer's function, Arguillas may have picked the simplest and sweetest-sounding Sogboanon words in her wide Sogboanon vocabulary to deliver a wonderful slice of Mindanao life to us, her avid readers, who were then, in her consciousness, serving audience at her actual act of writing. Returning the favor, she was with us at our act of reading, in our consciousness guiding us to laugh at phrases we thought were funny (and turning out to be actually funny) and contemplate in moments where we thought she was solemn (and turning out that, well, she really was).

It became obvious to me now, but not then, that that specific Arguillas column was resistance literature. Colonization, after all, did not end when the colonizers went home but continues to this day, perhaps even more so, and the columnist begun a surprising transformation process upon us, the dominant culture from Manila who were used to reading "imperial English-only op-ed columns". In short, Arguilla's column was her colonial discourse, and our transcending experience was the transcultural effect.

Ashcroft explains this phenomena, stressing the idea of meanability. He says that the language can, in fact, be altered (without abandoning the writer's function) but if done so, becomes limited to a situation in which the words have meaning. Still, he points out that while the altered writing may at a point become inaccessible to the reader, such inaccessibility is part of a strategy of difference, and that literature has the capacity to domesticate the most alien experience.

Reading Ashcroft's choice example came to me as an Arguillas deja vu, another transcending experience, another transcultural effect, a poem by the Caribbean poet Linton K. Johnson, which I have the pleasure of sharing with you, whether you are the colonizer or the colonized, ruminating a discourse -

di lan is like a rack
slowly shattahrin to san
sinkin in a sea of calamity
where tear breeds shadows daak
where people fraid fi waak
fraid fi tink fraid fi taak
where di present is haunted
by di paas

ON CULTURE, ITS TRANSFORMATION, THE RELEVANCE OF
LANGUAGE, AND THE MYSTERY OR MASTERY OF ITS MEANING

My Sociology professor in college defined culture in very generalized terms, as in every thing that makes us good. The idea that there is precision in generalization would have fit ma'am's terms to a t, for transcendence, were it not for the then agonizing headlines owing to the hazing death of a neophyte in the sadistic hands of fratmasters: LIVING (AND DYING) IN A CULTURE OF VIOLENCE.

My own definition is no less general, no more precise, but won't hopefully trigger a culture clash owing to contradiction: Culture is everything that makes a specific group of people that specific group of people. (Yikes. Is this what they call petitio principii? As in, We do not feel the movement of the earth because we move with the earth?) Actually, it can be stated differently, in as many versions as there are cultures: Culture is what makes Africans Africans or Filipinos Filipinos (or as one poem's title reads: The Irishness of Irish, which tempted me to write a piece entitled, The Joyceness of James Joyce).

But in the book Post Colonial Transformation by Bill Ashcroft (Rontledge, 2001), culture is presented in a very scholastic light, as the myriad ways in which a group of people makes sense of, represents and inhabits its world, and in a very interesting context, its transformation or response to imperial discourse.

In brief, the concern of the book is to present the colonized peoples' response to the cultural dominance of the colonizer (the latter being the West or Europe, the former being the Third World) and the transformation as context actually serves as a very transcending exception to the widespread belief that colonialism is unmitigated cultural disaster that destroys indigenous cultures. (I had long maintained this belief. In my readings of Irish literature, I came to understand the perpetual angst prevailing in Irish pop culture. As history had chronicled, Irish culture was practically obliterated by the British colonization, the King's English thrashing out their very own Gaelic language, now dying, being spoken only by a few. And as Roy Gwyn Smith said, Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?) But the strong antithesis is this: colonized cultures have become resilient that they changed the character of the colonizer, of the imperial culture itself, known as the transcultural effect.

The example given is a lift from the writings of Ralph Ellison, with music as the specific cultural feature. Accordingly, while the slaves in America (African natives who came in with the European settlers) were exposed to the classical music of their masters, there was no way for a transfer of this culture from colonizer to colonized (in italics because colonization is used not in political signification) due to the sophistication not only of the musical instruments used, but also of the music itself. But in the face of this exposure, the slaves learned to appreciate music and simply had to make do with what was available to them, namely, their hands, fingers and feet. And so they hummed, stomped their feet and snapped their fingers, the effect being a cacophony of sound that, while not having the symmetry and measurement of classical music, proved lilting and uppity. And so emerged this type of music now known to you and to me, now loved by the decsendants of descendants of the European colonizers and their kind, now a giant of a type in music, ladies and gentlemen, the music invented by the slaves, none other than jazz.

The concrete argument therefore is that culture is not static but move in a constant state of transformation.

(to be continued)