1.

The Centennial celebration of the University of the Philippines must necessarily be a high-powered production that befits an apparatus of the government to proclaim its social value relative to its theoretical signification. It must therefore give way to a ceremonious salutation of individuals who have been perceived by the status quo to have conferred on it premium marketing value – & it could only set store by players of the game within its ideological matrix: thus, when Justice Reynato S. Puno was deemed the most distinguished alumnus of the university, the implication could only be vast.

For instance, judicial activism must henceforth be prescribed as the only mode of action, for law is governance that holds a fractious society together. Its objectivity goes beyond partisan alignment.

To this, the bourgeois class that constitutes the state (the feudal oligarchy that preempts power) would only say amen.

Puno has demonstrated the canon of energizing the probity of rules – & his writ of amparo as well as writ of habeas data are landmarks in reformism.

Yet have these provisions stayed the armed components of the state from subverting the principles of accountability? Do they cower in fear, as if legalese were a Damoclean sword poised to cut the hydra of terror altogether?

Of course not.

They have given, the writs that whetted the libertarian appetite of the mainstream, false hope to the orphans of the desaparecidos – & the rule of the fascist clique has persisted with wild abandon.

When guns rule, law falls silent.

Yet, atavistic optimism must be impressed upon the young that revolutionary changes can only be achieved within the technical permutations of the law (there must be spaces of freedom within the chains). The ritual of observance in the midst of anarchic predisposition by the elite who continuously returns to power through electoral consensus (Badiou sneers at this failing of democracy that facilitates the recuperation of fascism) must be sustained for fear that the underclass would interpret dura lex, sed lex within their context.

That Puno should be held in high regard by the sustainers of the status quo would certainly raise the hackles of partisans if contested – the audience has been primed, after all, for that kind of positivity.

But the fearless (reckless to the neocons, who have fought for change, suffering privation & all that, even death) will never make it to the shortlist of patriots to be honored.

This is one occasion for mooning, indeed.

2.

In a Sunday column for the conservative Bulletin, “Breaking Signs,” Cirilo F. Bautista narrates an encounter with a former colleague who had gone into the profitable insurance underwriting. The ex-literary devotee said “in [his] line of job, [they] value straight talk… But poets… enjoy torturing [their] readers with [their] verbal obscurity.”

To which the columnist was quick to defend his turf: “You don’t like reading between the lines to see the meanings that are not obvious in the text but which are embedded there by the arrangement of the words. You must realize that the poem represents a kind of code – it is a human experience waiting to be uncovered and discovered… The imaginary is transferred into the real through the machinery of the metaphoric mind.”

But a message is a semiotic text, it should be argued, that “has contextual and circumstantial selections” in its various coding. For Umberto Eco, “a reader is supposed to single out the text’s elementary ideological structure, the operations overdetermined by his ideological subcodes…”

For instance, a reader of “Fleming stories who shares the ideological judgments expressed by the text at the level of discursive structure is probably not eager to look for an underlying ideological scaffolding at a more abstract level; on the contrary, a reader who challenges many of the author’s explicit value judgment is to go further with an ideological analysis so as to ‘unmask’” [Cirilo Bautista’s words are uncover & discover, which is his intention; but proceeds from a claim of non-ideological practice] “the hidden catechization performed at more profound levels.”

In a similar vein, “textuality,” according to Fredric Jameson, “may be considered a methodological hypothesis whereby the objects of study of the human sciences… are considered to constitute so many texts that we decipher and interpret, as distinguished from the older views of these objects as realities or existents or substance that we in one way or another attempt to know.”

(Formalist reading presumes that reading is knowing, but there’s a hell of a difference between the notion of writer as producer & writer as creator.)

The insurance salesman assumes (SOP in Philippine literature pedagogy) a text is transparent & self-manifest; the Dominican-bred columnist, though wary of the literal, isn’t however worried at all that his deciphering/interpretation plays only along a line of his ideological orientation (new criticism, anti-Marxist) & therefore limiting as well as limited.

The salesman operates at a lexical level where “clearly” his premiums are projected to redound to his own benefit: but it will not reveal how much of his contribution rakes in profit for the company & keeps the capitalist machine humming. The columnist intimates profoundly beyond the so-called Freudian manifest, but barely the latent which escapes the subject.

Both miss the point. They operate from within the discourse of monopoly capitalism & their disagreement is illusionary: they’re ideological brothers who believe in the same god of hermeneutics that feeds off the hegemonic palaver of the state.

The insurance paper will camouflage business profit; although the subscriber is made to believe he too will prosper mutually; the literary practitioner will insist on the particular line of meaning his poetic frame axiomizes, which he propounds is beyond ideology.

If Bautista, in the polemics of E. San Juan, Jr., states that poetry goes beyond the notion of class, or is not determined by it, he actually depoliticizes the text (if ever a dictator would bother with formalists, it is certainly for a different reason). Gelacio Guillermo, who once in his youth mistakenly valorized Bautista’s archipelagic grid, would however, in his later years, advocate a partisan-based lit on the overwhelming vantage of national liberation: in the varied spectrum of reality, a choice has to be made to respond to Sartre’s “For whom does one write?” or Lenin’s “What is to be done?”

To wit, an occasion of walking into the woods (we posit a poem of this nature) could symbolize a journey to the truth, but how would that implicate the current salvaging of innocents if the text is not specific about them? There is always this fear of being simplistically political, but much ambiguity happens this way, & we allow poets to go scot free, as if they’re above partisanship & their poems virtually cover the universal. As if, moreover, a poet has no blind spot. The so-called prophetic eye is an invention of shamans who would dazzle the eyes, never the mind.

Can an age see itself looking & performing the rituals of seeing? Can we see the back of our heads?

At summer workshops, where acolytes lie at the feet of their masters like herded cows, gurus turn benevolent shepherds. But a pat on the back could also be a sledgehammer on the consciousness.

“Let us save the children.”

3.

Jill Bolte Taylor, “a neuroscientist working at Harvard University’s brain research center,” recently experienced nirvana when she suffered a stroke.

There “was a piercing pain behind her eyes… a blood vessel had popped. Within minutes, her left lobe… began to fail her… [But] the incessant chatter that normally filled her mind disappeared. Her everyday worries – about a brother with schizophrenia and her high-powered job – untethered themselves from her and slid away.”

It is established “that the left brain gives us context, ego, time, logic… The right brain gives us creativity and empathy. Her message, that people can choose to live a more peaceful, spiritual life by sidestepping their left brain has resonated widely.”

But does one need to “lose the ability to speak, to understand numbers or letters, or even, at first, to recognize [one’s] mother? Eight years of recovery followed.”

An accidental route to nirvanic bliss, but is not recommended for anyone to allow seizures to hit the left lobe only, as if it could be perfectly arranged.

The psychostate can however be duplicated, or simulated, on the level of “mindfulness meditation,” according to Zindel Segal, a psychologist at the Center of Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. The therapy, it is called, is however “rooted in the teachings of a fifth-century B.C. Indian prince, Siddharta Gautama,” the Buddha.

This philosophy as a modern practice “help[s] relieve stress, soothe[s] addictive cravings, improve[s] attention, lift[s] despair and reduce[s] hot flashes.”

It is also a religion of fatalist acceptance where one “just lets [things] be… not trying to change anything.” [A similar therapy is conducted on trauma victims, of the recent sinking of Princess of the Stars, where “tearful relatives” are de-stressed clinically & made to confront the inevitability of the tragedy.]

It is built-into the process that “a person can turn, mentally to face a threatening or troubling thought and learn simply to endure the anger or sadness and let it pass, without lapsing into rumination or trying to change the feeling, a move that often backfires.”

Briefly, against dialectico-material principle, nothing can be changed. One must simply flow – a fallacy for those who would fashion existence in the context that man can work things out in a world of so-called metaphysical disorder.

“You have nothing to lose but your chains” would ring hollow, or mean differently to a guy in lotus position.

By transposition, the left is the domain of mathematicians; the right, phantasists.

Logic aligns with numbers, as in theories of possibility, while the nirvanic is the stuff of Anne Dillard’s what-ifs, the plausible that challenges rationality.

Are we to argue then that fictionists [the so-called creative spirits] are blindly speeding into the dark, while promising flashes of light in the horizon to guide us through the malevolent journey; or our guides be Einstein or Hawking who could see through the irrational bluff & reduce everything to logical precision?

Shall we find comfort in simply crossing our fingers?

4.

Ka Dan

The news of his earthly demise wasn’t anything to shock him like a surprising whiff of fresh air in a fetid room.

Already, there had been ominous signs, but he still couldn’t help catching his breath when he scanned the inside page: Ka Dan Vizmanos, at 79, had passed away.

A so-called renegade when the army war deep into Eisenhower cult, he broke out of the militarist cocoon as early as the ’50s – a paradox of the spirit that would not dare consign its fate to rigid rules & regulations, unexamined motives of power, Pavlovian mode of behavior. Tortured & subjected to truth serum, he was able to hold his ground, survive the inquisitorial regime of Marcos, & find refuge in militant orbs that kept him from vegetating, like any retiree, into wasted obscurity.

He was ever the fighter.

He once rode a rememberer’s car into a house on Roces that had since been demolished. He talked about small things to keep the conversation light & pleasurable, never slipping into the grim & determined tone of a cartoon superhero.

Like his old generation of warriors, he had finally stepped aside for the dissenters in the wings to seize the center stage of history, where he had left the onus of Phoenix-dreams of his time.

5.

Apropos the Supreme Court, what do you make of old fogeys beholden to an appointive President & who interpret the law that binds our little lives with their infallible majesty - & laymen couldn’t question their hermeneutic prowess because no one is higher than themselves?

They who are trapped in their own ideological limitations & spheres of fears & comfort, point out the entrances & exits of the text like some labyrithine passageways in Kafka’s castle - & we can only talk to the guards at the gate because we are not empowered to proceed?

If a simple task, for instance, would be administered on these self-proclaimed thinkers who tinker with truth & meaning, like making them read a poem, a short story, anything that is discursive, & if civilians are allowed to join the fray of readers, how would they fare?

For sure, there will be a cacophony of voices, including the jurists’, that will subvert their authoritarian tenor. Consequently, all things deemed equal, we should have an inkling of their individual ideologemes & “see finally that the emperor wears no clothes.”

That Trillanes couldn’t attend the Senate hearings – the court crows about the superstructure of the law that projects it as rationally impregnable – while the likes of Lapid, Revilla, Zubiri (whose votes are still contested; imaginary unlike Trillanes’s) & other lesser lights with like intelligence quotient, could sit before a nationwide microphone & babble, boggles logic, even common sense, that the impervious arbiters of justice in the land, would have us, legal numbskulls, believe in their wisdom, much like religious fanatics who are advised that the ways of the lord are inscrutable & (surely in the final analysis once the smoke of disbelief allegedly clears) just.

6.

The journey of a thousand miles starts with a small step.

The devil is in the detail.

Bromides that may underlie catastrophes.

When a phone caller aired over DZMM teleradyo that the Sulpicio Lines is noted for not graciously feeding stranded passengers, the Princess of the Stars’ sinking becomes explicable.

No, the Pag-asa weather bulletin was as reliable & erratic as CNN’s, which predicted a northward route. Yes, the high pressure ridge made the typhoon veer off to Romblon & slice through Southern Luzon…

The captain, some people aver, could have turned back to a nearer island shelter, but it was touted as the jewel in the Sulpicio shipyard, & tough enough to weather such cyclonic threat. It didn’t…

Was it the almost reflex action on the part of authorities that a re-routing midway would be a logistic maintenance that would bite off chunks from company profit?

The captain’s possible apprehension about headquarters’ reprimand might have forced his hand “to damn the torpedoes & steam at full speed ahead.”

A.

She was asked by the leader: “When will you, reporter, stop writing about fighting in Sulu? Is that all what you reporters are after?”

Earlier in the day, she had been “slapped in the face and pulled around till [she] hit a rock… ordered to undress and changed into an outfit they threw at [her] face… pointed a gun at her forehead… Late in the night they [had] pushed her into a shallow pit… and someone [had] pissed on her…”

A suicide bomber, for Terry Eagleton, “by actually accepting his death, frees [himself] from death and turn[s] it into a weapon… forc[ing] a point out of the ultimately pointless. As well as a way of killing a lot more people, death becomes a symbolic statement that the way he is living is even more dire than non-existence…” one thing that is “stronger than death is his anger [the kidnappers’].”

The contempt hostage-takers, in the name of religion & social debasement, hold against Christian civilians (there are cases of Muslim collateral damage) is the very paradigm of the politics of a “Third World society, first century Palestine” where traditional cultures are “last-ditch resistance to… modernity.”

In a sense, they mimic the ancient Moors who defended their turf from the Medieval knights in alleged search of the Holy Grail – & their aversion for the Crusaders still enflame believers of Islamic truth. After all, mimicry, according to Michael Taussig, “lies in the copy drawing on the character and power of the original, to the point whereby the representation may even assume that character and that power.”

Think of Janjalani rediscovering himself as a mythical Paladin in the same manner that penitents are virtual Christs themselves who must be nailed on the cross.

We conflate here terrorism & original: the bandits, in the name of the first transgression, have become the resurrected warriors out to crush the infidels with the same imagined brutality of interlopers who inflict pain on them. The hostages are consequently the very reality of the corporate world that has marginalized them – & it does matter little if these outsiders belong to the same oppressed class as they surely are.

We take note of the inquisitorial voice that denounces the ordinary reporter for portraying their kind as violent – paradoxically revealing a blindness of himself to his own brutality.

We are reminded of the conservative paradigm that denounces the republicanism of Danton & Robespierre as the classic case of the revolution devouring of its own children, of victims partaking of the role of executioner they had earlier revolted against. But this a reactive response from the far right that sees no qualitative difference between polarities.

B.

But are the Sulu denizens in the same league as Iraqi suicide bombers, whose nationalism & religious fundamentalism twin with the Islamic contempt for the maternal body & preference for the allegedly spiritual?

The Mindanao caper on Drilon & her cameramen repeats the old Sipadan chaos, where Muslim rogues & Christian bureaucrats conspired to corral Burnham & Company – in the process exposing the marketing scam to siphon off state & foreign donor’s bounty, in the name of negotiation.

The beheading of the victims was a simple point to raise the ante on ransom money & project the absoluteness of their beastliness. The language of terror is that which moves the urgency of what’s at stake.

If, however, they cannot value human life as a metaphysical dictum, why score therefore the inhumanity of state satraps?

The reporters who are currently detained must have been asked this: but does this advance their plea for social justice?

“A local official,” moreover, “had asked whether media could still do something about Sulu’s image crisis.”

Alas, but a Kotong cop has a more viable PR possibility for a makeover…

C.

The tragedy of the recent Sulu kidnapping is not so much the ambiguity of terrorism itself (“that which seeks to turn despair into hope, but to draw its power from despair as such”) as the corporatism that has muddled its projection of counter-violence against a state that turns hungry peasants into gun-toting bosses.

The haggling over money in exchange for prisoners has turned into a transaction for the highest fee – thus reducing their mission into a market ploy, like pricing animal stocks for the abattoir. Is there any difference therefore between a cow to be slaughtered & a human to be beheaded or shot?

While they denounce the commodification in a system that reifies their being, they nevertheless subscribe to the monetary mode of recouping their subjective loss. Thus is the absurd that makes of the anarchic group a cheap simulacrum of the al-Qaeda in Iraq & Iran, although they draw inspiration from them.

That they are enabled by scalawags in the state apparat is the unsaid that encourages right-wing fanatics to unleash their brand of militarist terror & that is the rub. More than ever, the state operators benefit from their orchestrated mayhem, as political observers are wont to suggest.

D.

“In the pragmatic, disenchanted, distinctly unmetaphysical climate of advanced capitalism,” according to Eagleton, “those for whom culture and militancy are inseparable…” Western postmodernism “rides roughshod over local communities and traditional sentiments…” which results in “Western society… leav[ing] a culture of smouldering ressentiment in the wake.”

Thus the resurgence of the JI group in the southern tip of the archipelago, which is fertile ground for First World incursion – economically & politically: after all, Ibn Laden was a CIA creation for anti-Soviet operators in Afghanistan, only to become later the scourge of New York.

For a fundamentalist, language is not metaphorical, but singular & transparent, for the alleged truth is self-manifesting, contrary to the positing of Derrida, where multiplicity & consequently the final truth is most elusive. If a text promises a believer of a reward of 60 virgins after a mission that does away with his corporeal body, it literally meant that. But what escapes the sacral assurance with patriarchal overtone is the promise recuperates the feudal Persian practice of the sultanate’s harem, where desire flourishes because sanctified by laws.

& when Christians are deemed infidels, as in the past history of the Medieval Crusade, they must remain so to this day: the age-old civilization persists as in the Koran, & redistribution must be visited upon its detractors, ever on their own kind who would reinterpret it in a liberal humanist way of the New World.

Terror is holified.

Yet, we must also take note “that the predatory actions of capitalism breed, by way of defensive reaction, a multitude of closed cultures” (in Middle East & Asia in general), then creating the resistance by which current fundamentalism tries to protect itself, its beneficiaries among the elect seeking to perpetuate themselves by their authoritarian hermeneutics of the Koran & the persistence of atavistic tradition.

Revolutions come out of the womb of love & compassion, never fear & loathing.

They never seem to learn.

E.

True, in a universe that is proclaimed by postmodernists as uncertain & contingent, terror has become the essence of existence – a political rationale that allows nihilism to be the central thematics of our times. (Some point pounced upon by dictators & monopoly capitalists as precondition for steering clear of the abyss; & if allowed everyone to be overwhelmed by such possibility, the road to Dachau is most justified.)

But, as Zizek cautions to balance, as it were, the equation: “The same goes for revolutionary politics: the horrible experience with Stalinist error should teach us how idealism and cruelty are two sides of the same coin…” It also should “in no way inhibit us in our search for a ‘good terror’ as the key ingredient of any truly radical politics.”

& we ask: do the Sulu brigands make for a positively (deconstructive) dictum on the violence of the violated? That the subaltern has the inviolable right to acquire the master’s mayhem?

Can the Islamic children of war & hunger, taking after their wrathful elders, assume a higher moral ground against a corporate state and/or Christian outsiders they are wont to denounce as the bane of their squalid existence?

Isn’t the Sulu kidnapping as an industry, in a quirk of historical analogy, reminiscent of the slave trade that saw Western colonialists raid African & Asian settlements during the foundational years of Empire?

Isn’t their mode of Islam only a decoy play for accumulating capital in the pursuit of counter-hegemony?

O A perverse terror is upon us.

2.

Father’s Day

A.

His father

was the town’s

leading tailor,

but he’d prefer

denims & sneakers

that raised his mother’s

gentle voice:

Why does their son

embarrass his parents

with his shoddy looks?

When readymade pants

& shirts became de rigeuer,

the shop had to close down

& his father

would look for

business spots

but it was too late

a time

for custommade apparel

to be king again…

(Seasons are always

cruel to

old souls

who raise the artisanal

roof…)

Now he rues

the superfluous brands

the market offers

as terrific loot

whenever he preens

before the mirror

like a faded peacock

& longs for

their once-upon-a-time

loving reproach.

At his father’s wake,

by his urn of ashes,

lay the scissors

& tape measure

of his trade

that signified

an epoch

& his insolent youth…

B.

“We who are fathers

are ourselves fatherless,”

the first line of a sonnet

he uttered at 19

his past drawing up

a future

that is his present now…

Should he have feared

its sad, sad gravity,

like a shot

wildly fired in the dark?

He is thankful

for that open-eye blindness

that stopped him

from keeping it

like a secret letter

of the arcana

in his heart.

1.

A.

Was it that time (he was six) when they fetched him in the middle of a sunny afternoon from school to see his infant brother, all swaddled in cotton cloth, & lying on a small table, a candle flickering at headmost edge. He had passed away (he could have been victim of sepsis, but who would know if no doctor was present at this birthing?) but he couldn’t bring himself tears: he was overwhelmed by strange emotions of it all – his mother blankly looking at her baby, his grandmother praying in a corner, & no one had trickled in yet to pay their respects. He wasn’t even afraid – the dead haunt you into a world of terror – to sit by his coffin at the calesa that brought them to the municipal cemetery. & when his mother broke down before the sealing of the small tomb, he felt awkwardly embarassed to see her crying for the first time.

She was with her when she asked for Openg to dine with them, sharing their salt fish & gruel. She feared being alone, he would know later, & it would be the beginning of her nervous breakdown which led her to spend months in Manila… That was all he could recollect; every episode thereafter like a blank reel of film… All he knew was he would rather be alone, cover himself with a wooden blanket, & linger in the dark landing of the stairs until his pious grandmother would call him up for supper.

He didn’t have any playmate, so he would just spend mornings & afternoons listening to his neighbor’s radio & the twitter of birds in the huge acacia tree that limned the whole compound where they rented the ground floor of a makeshift apartment.

Was that when it all started, this feeling of anomie & the incurable brooding that infest his daily reckoning?

Was it something that caused him bad grades at the university that violently pulled him out of his rustic pace & delivered him right smack into the hassle of city life which made him cringe at the company urbane strangers & academics with phony American accent?

All his elementary life he had spent cultivating a vegetable plot in a provincial school – & any idea of enlightenment (read: the age of reason) was accidental.

& so on.

This impoverished childhood & rebellious youth – did it correctly image his passage into adulthood?

Yet “psychologists from England’s University of Plymouth and US University of Virginia” in the persons of Simone Schall & her colleagues would report “that happy children don’t always learn their lessons well.” In “top-down processing, a good mood tended to rely on existing knowledge… to understand new information.” While “in bottom-up processing… people start with no pre-conceived notions and build up their own thoughts and ideas based on what they learn as they go on.” (As quoted from the column of Massie Ballon.)

He was neither sad nor happy: only he felt “that something is amiss, triggering detail-oriented, analytical processes.”

But it would be superfluous to apply it to him who would face a deadend when navigating the past: he had to be reminded of events that sifted in during conversations, photos that placed him at a particular place & time…

Nothing in this case could account for melancholia, no matter how scientific it could be.

Even literature couldn’t explain it all.

& how badly people set great store by it.

B.

Which, in effect, argues for the dictum that losers are smarter than spoiled brats?

This is SOP for most apologists who aver, that given equal opportunity, the technocrats of the future would emerge from the ranks of overachieving scavengers at Payatas, Gramsci’s potential organic intellectuals who will pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

This is something devoutly to be wished; however, these are rugby-addled brains, noodle-fattened bodies whose genes have been altered so toxically there is nothing much society can expect but to lock them up or send them to rehab for they are the virtual monsters bred at the margins, out to wreak violence even on members of their own subclass.

Writers who originate from the sanscullotes would bat for Schall’s lab results – as if by being celebrated by the mainstream & pursuing the ideological hegemony of the state, they shall have proved themselves superior by virtue of their suffering which they could writerly retell with clarity & empirical truths.

But they have likewise internalized the neo-fascism of the state through a notion of language & craft, embraced a lifestyle of the rich & famous… [You can pull a boy out of a country, but never a country out of a boy, they say. & it will show.]

Affluent but sad: that is the bummer.

2.

& when he thinks of how these kids prepare assiduously info packages for incoming freshmen so they could savor a life worth making in UP – the onerous tuition hike, the system that penalizes everyone, regardless of class, for an education that serves foreign corporations, etc – he becomes all worked up, as if gripped by the misplaced sentiment for the poor who tugs at collective heartstrings. But Bob Dylan douses their slow fire: “You can’t expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor.”

So he turns suspicious of the revolutionary wager that the masses will be ripe for revolt, which too often is a losing proposition: on the basis of Kantian moral imperative, they will be lacking in ethical superiority to judge the executors of evil designs precisely because they are contaminated by the Devil himself…

But Brecht is aware of this contradiction, as in the parable of the Gordian Knot:

“… Oh, the man

Whose hand tied it was not

Without plans to undo it, but alas,

The span of his life was only long enough

For the one thing, the tying.

A second sufficed

To cut it.”

3.

She stood on a mound of stones to view the spot where our feline possession, Bugsy, was laid to rest two years ago. She had been warned of snakes slithing in the overgrown grass, & could only whisper a short prayer across the untended lawn of a house slowly falling apart…

He was family, & “deeper than all the roses” is the loss at his passing at the animal clinic.

He was ours. All lowly creatures, so-called, deserve that affectionate moment of remembering. If only humanity were civilized, then there would be, he mused as she stood silently at the edge of the front yard, a kind of peace, like a gentle wind, in this troubled land where cats & dogs roam in hunger & in-chains while merciless humans pray at angelus for God’s merciful blessing.

4.

Fredric Jameson clarifies that savages of the past are historically different from the savages of today: yes, there’s a chasm that separates the technological civilization of the modern from the primitivic periods of early tribes. The former lived in an enclosed world that was cryptic & natural; the latter pretends to be in full control of his wits, & like someone who stands on a cliff, sees the bigger picture, diagrams the expansive space.

So saying, contemporary philosophers stand on the shoulders of their forefathers: they can now advance beyond the permutations of Plato’s cave, or Kant’s categorical imperative.

Whenever he wakes up, as if from deep nightmare, he is overwhelmed by undefinable exhaustion & malaise: a ghost must have pushed him down on a cushion of pins like an Indian mystic. Stress? Cerebral atrophy? Lingering idiocy?

He’s wired to everything that seems to media-happen in the world: the guilt trip of American voters that made them rally behind the Afro-American who mouths change as if he could fix American imperialism; the death of children in the earthquake zone of China; the genocide in Darfur; the sex trade in Algeria, London, everywhere; the bombing in Iraq; the burkha myth for women in Iran, etc.

He’s helplessly suffocated by the avalanche of events exploding in every nook & cranny of the planet.

O how he wished he was a neanderthal savage who would only worry over a volcano erupting in the vicinity, or the other tribe foraying into their own hunting ground…

The equation wouldn’t be quadratic; & the survival kit simple enough.

Technology has become a source of multiplex of stress coming from all sides.

It’s the “technology of the railroad against the plane,” which implicates, for Paul Virilio, the notion of speed that spills us into a fast lane, this cybernetics “which organizes networks of relations and information and, as such, they quite obviously convey the perspective of a humanity that is not only unified but also reduced to uniformity.”

For the “new technologies,” he warns, carry “a certain type of accident, one that is no longer local and precisely situated, like the sinking of the Titanic or derailment of a train but general, an accident that immediately affects the entire world.”

Never has the adage “no man is an island” assumed a more catastrophic reading.

5.

The mourners who lined up at the actor’s wake in their jogging shorts & sneakers so early in the morning are the very iconic of the tabloid perversities that allow the profane to be elevated to the level of the acceptable.

These bums never knew the guy as a friend, for sure, but they were ogling his remains like pedestrians poking with their eyes an animal lying dead on the pavement, or voyeurs on necrophiliac high.

If only he were God & could unleash thunderbolts from his hands: he would scuttle them like cattle to let the family be alone in their grief. In dignity. In disconsolate peace.

Alas, but there is this problem of ownership: the vulgar public thinks he owes them…

[& Marilyn Monroe’s Playboy spread still turns them on.]

6.

(For Camille)

When Jerry West traded Vlade Divac, his Yugoslavian center who came in after Kareem Abdul-Jabbar retired his Laker uniform, for a Philadelphia kid named Kobe Bryant who was fresh off high school, cage cynics must have scored it a crazy stunt.

What did West see in the tyro named Kobe?

Years later, the “Black Samba” would clinch the MVP award in the NBA; & West’s gamble would bring smile at how far he could see into the future.

Michael Jordan drafted Kwame Brown, & became laughing stock among high rollers.

She applied for an instructor’s job at a downtown university & breezed through the exams with flying colors. Yet the old fogeys still insisted on graduate units – as if extra credential is index of intellectual clout. They stuck to their rules they themselves interpreted in whichever way.

How about kids who would helplessly fidget at the hands of time-warped pedagogues, whose spiel is read from yellowing notebooks?

Her first heartache, an interminable sadness – but there would be more because the Althusserian apparat is a snake pit.

1.

The guy in Lubao, Pampanga who held hostage the passenger bus Genesis, where started the parodic tragedy, had the “women strip themselves naked, ordering them to take off their bras & panties” because they are, like his wife, generic & must pay out his humiliation. She “cheated” on him, but is safely out of reach in Negros.

Hell hath no fury like a man scorned; & woe to those who would snicker behind his back in a country where women should be fiercely loyal & religiously pious. Marriage, after all, had warned them to serve their gender superiors.

O he couldn’t understand the times. Feudal knights, when off they run to battle the infidels, would lock up their ladies’ chastity belts because the latter cannot be trusted. Only a horse was worth the freedom of his fief.

But the world seemed to have turned inside out the tradition that kept the ship of love cruising on an even keel.

She’s nowhere to be found at moments she’s most needed. A truant with ants in her ass?

He could only raise a storm in the teacup of his powerlessness.

He was, in his mind, the sacrificial victim in the name of justice. After all, the police who did him in surely shared his point of view.

2.

It’s almost like a religious mass: there will be talks of a school crisis (read: educational infrastructure is shoddy, teachers are underpaid, tuition is skyrocketing, & so forth) & the state in turn will intone the same panacea: bigger slice of the pie & so forth. This will be repeated year after year; still all will be muttering the need to raise the alarm on the quality of education.

But this has been ongoing since Rizal’s class in physics. We’ve always managed with mediocre students & the country is none the worse for it.

After all, educating the young is meant fashioning them according to the tenets of the apparat of the state: loyal to the cause of capitalism, dutifully subservient to American hegemony, blindly keeping the machine functioning. There is no imbroglio: we get what we want – a docile population & a diasporic labor force that worships at the lavatories of Europe & maintains the safety valve of a boiling kettle that is this archipelago.

Quality is substandard? But if we produced intelligent kids, would that disrupt the system? A thinking mass is anathema to totalitarian rule.

Things as they are, the state merely churns out proactive press releases.

It is at home with the idea that civil society should rather go around it, never meet it head-on.

3.

Certainly, the campus scene will be punctured with pockets of resistance against tuition hike, et cetera. The young resistors will be at it again, while the rest will scrap it in a system that best serves their ambition – bourgeois & republican.

How long must the dissenters keep up with their passion.

Cynics shrug: only time will tell. A history of apostasy has blurred their vision: the most vociferous have turned parliamentarians, the most adventurous have sought comfort zones, the most wild have invented an infrastructure of reasons that they are beyond all that…

But as armchair observers, should we knock them for what has been perjured as historical error?

If they failed their mission, it was not their own undoing; but apathy of the multitude that wouldn’t rage against the dying of the light.

The signifiers “masses, party, revolution and dialectics,” for Badiou, must be uploaded with new signifieds.

4.

A.

It was a sleepy afternoon when he dropped by Kowloon to buy food for supper. The cashier hardly listened to him as she was preoccupied with her kids running around like the Chinese restaurant were their own backyard.

The waiter grouchily listed down his order, then ambled off to the kitchen for which he had to wait for some 40 minutes or so. The other members of the staff listlessly paced the floor – there was so much time on their hands & only a long table at the farthest end of the hall was occupied.

They were engaged in light but sporadic banter about someone else’s kids who probably would be pampered into thinking the world revolves around them… The crew looked like they were hard put to hide a routinary ennui, & would pull, if they could, the afternoon faster on its wheel: cold beer & that evening show would make their day…

He computed a thousand afternoons must have elapsed before that afternoon & they were erect & uprightly then… All their lives they would be staring at daily servings of noodles & fried chickens, arranging spoons & forks & plates on the table, changing covers & napkins, refilling glasses, all for the glory of the future.

They had probably forgotten how to think out of the box: their minds a metronomic repetition of all the afternoons that usually pass into mornings, then start all over again.

In this deadend life, he wondered if he was better off communing with kids who in turn would repeat themselves to their own kids…

The revolution seemed so far, far off, like Godot waiting for Godot.

B.

The Erestain Flores de Mayo wound down the fourth street & he could smell the estero as they passed him on his way home from the lottery.

The unshod were screaming like crazy, engaging in silly chatter, & lighting missiles to turn the occasion in their lower-class mind like a television episode in color. They must have their fantasy.

He again wondered if this execrable mass – who would rob you blind if you so much as lie drunken on the street – which bleeding hearts call the downtrodden, deserves their pitiful attempt at claiming a patch of the moonlit sky for themselves.

Yes, these religious freaks breed like fruitflies. Regardless of the sentiment however (which are structural, not subjective), the neighborhood mob of anarchists will not create that wished-for history.

Unless an epiphanic rupture – beyond all scientific theories, & actuarial forecasting – miraculously descends upon them like an angel’s avenging sword.

C.

How could Althusserian rupture happen?

He was reminded of the raucous crowd who’s all spleen, semen, spittle, yellow teeth, dusty feet & smelly armpits.

How could they lead us to the promised land?

Certainly, not with the mystique that enveloped Paul on his way to Damascus – that is too transcendental & requires of volumes of proofing. Something concrete, tangible, empirical to convince us that salvation is not pure imagination, but the possibility of Lacan’s Real.

(Imagine the mob raising its fists because it knew Lenin by heart, spouting poetry by poet-priest Ernesto Cardenal who was the Sandinista nightmare of America.)

What confluence of logics must occur for all the motley desires to conjunct in a calculated & progressive mode toward utopia?

Sizing up the crowd, he couldn’t believe in miracles. For a moment, his heart fell.

But he remembered this was the terrain in Moscow at the time of Lenin, Beijing at the time of Mao, Cuba at the time of Castro…

The future embraces us from behind & we stagger, as if shell-shocked.

5.

The project is to introduce the masters for pedagogic purposes: they would write up their massive texts in small but crystalline doses. The intention is to bring the profound, convoluted philosophers right onto the dining table, as it were, of popular taste, so the inheritors of the future would be guided accordingly. Commendable it is, indeed: & hardy souls have picked up their choices in Zizek, Agamben, Nietzsche, Giddens, Habermas, Althusser, Confucius, Lao-Tze, & so on to make the world less impoverished, such as it is, & edge out of the mainstream cheap talk & fascist discourses that have become tradition.

About time that a philosophy reader be made available for Filipinos – the repetition of state & religious lies has become truth itself.

But retelling the masters, in his mind, is akin to re-translating them – both processes intertwined to ambiguate a simple task. Milan Kundera, in refuting the vulnerability of a sentence in Kafka’s “The Castrating Shadow of Saint Garta,” (redone into English by Vinlatte in 1938), explains that “while the translator’s situation is extremely delicate: he must keep up with the author and at the same time remain himself… he is faced with the dilemma of want[ing] to invest the text with his own creativity, as if to give himself heart… choos[ing] a word that does not obviously betray the author but still arises from his own initiative.”

Reading an author is not a simplistic relaying of information: the text is refracted when it passes through the ideological matrix of a reader who must reinvent the writer (all intentions to duplicate the author are assumed as lily-white). But, of course, translators/readers have been warned against this.

Be that as it may, reading consequently is a mode of translating. But such task of defining philosophers of the ages is served well by a generation that has the discipline of monks out to preserve the legacy of multiple truths.

In this light, he has decided to go his separate way: he’ll just stop & smell the flowers. Too late in his life has he realized he’s not cut out to wrestle with the griffon of words & he cannot undo time & circumstance.

6.

The couple drifted by his table at Heaven N’ Eggs.

The guy kept to himself, while the woman fussed over her orders.

He didn’t mind the two lovers; he couldn’t care less. After all, they wouldn’t with his.

Moments later, he caught a glimpse of the guy solitarily staring into his dalandan juice. The woman had left him.

When he had finished, he passed her sitting at the patio table, as if pressed for air.

The two were only an eyeful of a distance off.

Love on the rocks? Or simply, to be by her own lonesome & watch cars roll by.

But this is a tale already prefigured in Lubao – if pursued to its grim conclusion.

7.

He was exultant at his presence in a world forum that saw him commingle with writers of probable renown – guys who had been blessed by their embassies to speak on behalf of their native kind, which meant status quo, connection, normative reputation.

At the podium, the crown would relish every word from his tongue like it were pearl cast before dignified swine; after all, his coming was index of his importance, his literary output, his right to 15 minutes of fame. Anyway, it was the unwritten code among participants not to be disputatious: it was not a debating society set to establish their claims to truth, but a comradeship of the elect in the name of the word. That they’re blest because notified & noticed was fair enough – every writer had dreamt of such eventuality.

Committee assistants, janitors & kibitzers would certainly gawk at the high-spirited exchanges, as if the world was listening to their politesse. Literature, after all, was stuff they were told to read & digest if only to serve as lampposts to their personal inquiries. Their own wisdom they would hold secret in themselves like familial heirloom rarely made to see the light of day.

So he was receptive of their celebratory mood. His words did matter, after all. Detractors were nowhere in sight. Only the magnanimous civility of librarians, autograph hunters, CL majors in awe of everything bound in print that kept his spirit high…

He was indeed well pleased with himself, & would be quick to tell the tale once the plane landed in Manila.

8.

She’s an unica hija to middle class parents when she was young. Pampered but not abusive of origins, she was modest in ambition & style. All she had probably wanted was a humdrum life of keeping house, tending the garden, caring for the cats her mother gave shelter to in the village neighborhood.

But her mother passed away; soon her dad, after a lingering illness, followed; she was left to fend for herself with her only son who had a hole in her heart. Of course, he’s grown now, but would vanish much too often to be with his lower class paramour. She had only herself & an old nursemaid, ever faithful to a fault, to mind the house now badly in need of repairs. She had wanted to sell off the property, along with some inherited lot in the province, but times seemed to be hard & no taker had come forward.

Bills, bills, bills. & there was no one to turn to, except some relatives who acted out like her virtual pawnshop: strictly business, & she could retrieve the family heirloom if money could be made available.

Everyday, she had to ride public transport, because the old Honda & SUV had broken down, on some small errand for a casual employer. But it’s a paltry grind, enough to work out the ennui of the day.

This second of June, she was startled out of a troubled sleep by the intrusive beeping of her phone: the voice on the other line was warm, solicitous.

She had even forgotten her birthday.

9.

Inside the classroom, so early in the morning when everyone is still bleary-eyed & sound bytes from the night concert were still ringing in their ears, he will be scanning, like Cortez on the cliff of Darien, for something familiar or strange. But their faces will always be the same: impassive with this time’s neurosis, which unnerves him a bit. He has to work double time again to exorcise their point of view, like a high priest, that has held them in check: keeping faith in the system, blindly carrying on the ideals of a corrupt generation, & playing the game smoothly, “successfully.”

They will make as if they’re focused on what he’s saying (but is he focused on what he’s dispersing?). At the end of the session, they’ll heave a sigh of relief –patience is all that’s needed to beat the path to their dreams’ door. Who cares about ideologemes?

They know better: money is not the root of evil; they’ll snatch it if they can, for blessed are the loaded because they’ll inherit the future.

Always, as in his own lifetime, barbarians storm the gates of hell.

1.
Liar

He has been
promising himself
for the millionth time:
there will be
no more sad poems,
but he’s a liar,
he does not believe his words,
he sees them in every stone,
arabesque of leaves & shadows
in cold evenings…
He’s a liar
devoured by her face,
her voice,
an angle of her being
that have eluded him
like he were a caged animal
pawing at the air
& the fata morgana
ambles on into the mists…
& time spins
on its axis
toward a void of days –
& he will lie again
for the millionth time
that there will be no more
sad poems
for her who flies
with the wind,
her trail of laughter
like hailstones
falling, falling, falling…

2.

The Absurd

She hands him a slim collection of Vladimir Nabokov’s Cloud, Castle, Lake, which contains the story “Signs and Symbols.” “It’s good,” she adds, but tells him the title doesn’t seem to add up. He devours the paper with perplexed ambiguity: the Russian aristocrat’s language is crisp & dense, but the narrative’s progression is a pirate’s gangplank that leads to the sea… It is a challenge: how the meaning eludes him when it is almost at his fingertips, the invisible beast of truth gawks from the wings.

It’s a story of a child detained in a ward because his parents couldn’t handle him: a suicidal freak, “a rare case” where “the patient imagines that everything around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. He excludes real people from the conspiracy – because he considers himself much more intelligent than other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees…” & so forth.

Nature speaks to him in a language of claustrophobic terror. & he would rather disappear from earth, “tear a hole in his world and escape.”

The story ends with the couple sharing midnight tea, disturbed by the ringing of the phone…

(Of course, it could be the voice of nightmare that their son hears – but this is too methodical, artificial unity & technique that attend any educated reading. But what of it then, if a crafty closure is done?)

The shrewd progression seems to flow to disparate dead-ends; & he wonders how the story can be decoded, even if only to keep a measure of pride that there is a “meaning hidden to be mined.” But he has fallen, it appears, into a trap neatly laid out by Nabokov about a reality that unfolds but bereft of any truth or direction. (Cynics may deduce a vast indifference of an émigré to Bolshevik reading.)

Things are contingent on the bottom of the abyss, logical on the edge of insanity.

An orthodox Marxist would be a cyclist running around in circles if he insists all the doors to the absolute are interrelated, like patterns on a shell.

But supposed everything, as Zizek proposes, is a sign of chaos, & the universe turns out to be an inexplicable as any cosmic explosion?

Can human drama be any different?

In Camus’s The Stranger, Mauersault, blinded, as it were, by the Algerian sun flaring in his eyes as he strolls down the beach, suddenly kills an Arab & must account for his act of absurdity & nothingness. He must be responsible for the crime, “even if for Nabokov’s child, he does not allude to the conspiracy among men.”

What political exegesis can be made of this?

3.

The Unbeliever

Which brings us to the broadsheet editorial that starts off with encomiums from Crispin Beltran’s comrades – that, even if he did not die in the streets which could have been pretty dramatic & symbolic, he would end up just the same a heroic figure because he was the iconic voice of labor, & so forth. Politicians would wade in: they didn’t agree with him all the time, but he’s worthy of their admiration & respect (although that does not absolve them of the crime of upholding neo-liberal interests).

Until the essay winds down to an ideological blip on capitalism: says the writer, who, technically sums up the paper’s political platform, which, it could be presumed, is not shared by the whole, as individuals, editorial staff: “It is not Beltran’s fault that the principle he fought for throughout his life, the right of workers to organize themselves has lost some of its urgency & its appeal. The ranks of organized labor are thinning, in the Philippines as well as abroad. In large part, this is the result of improvements in work conditions. (That was always a failing in Marx, the inability to see that capitalism may have a self-healing capacity.)”

This is a mouthful that elevates the writer to a guru higher than the theorist of historical materialism (the capacity to see is historically situated), & keeps him as mimic of Fukuyama who alleged “the failure of alternatives to liberal capitalism” & proclaimed the very end of history in a mode of production that is essentially & forever capitalist upon which mankind cannot advance any further.

That, it is argued by neo-liberals, capitalism can be benevolent is exactly, for Alex Callinicos, a fallacy; after all, “a benevolent capitalist who paid his workers wages that broadly corresponded to the amount of value they created would find himself out of business. For, directly or indirectly, from profits are funded the investments through which individual capitals expand and/or improve their productive capacity.” & though Marx “praises capitalism in The Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse… he also means that the development of the productive forces makes capitalism constitutively liable to crisis.”

The global situation of overproduction & falling profits wreak havoc on the working class (note the thinning of the local ranks is proportional to the diasporic plight of labor that is kept cheap & abundant in the market, to the delight of multinational executives) – this is fundamental, almost dogmatic; & the so-called “self-healing capacity” of capitalism suppresses the grim reality of free-trade zone strikes caused by the exploitative policies, the threat to unions, human trafficking & worse, the salvaging of leaders as well as militants who are impediments to systemic stability. The decline in union organizing is certainly not a natural fate, but a handiwork of fascist violence that allows government to look the other way.

That the system, moreover, is “self-healing” doesn’t make capitalism an organic organization, virtually a living entity reminiscent of Deleuze & Guattari’s hydra, with self-corrective mechanism or an immunizing physiology that sutures labor & capital. Rather, it is the sustenance of brute force to normalize the nature of things, as it were. An economy that serves corporate or oligarchic few can always convulse at flashpoints of the politico-ideological.

After all, it is “capitalism against the planet.”

But the editorial’s patent blindness is basic to postmodernist sway in the ’90s. The writer, steeped in his fashionable discourse in elite universities, is not aware that, in the analysis of Luc Boltanski & Eve Chapiello, “the renewal of social criticism in France during the 1990s in reaction to the experience of neo-liberalism” was something “that postmodernism sought to prohibit.” For Callinicos, “the re-emergence of anti-capitalist discourses and movements therefore marks the breakdown of the hegemony that postmodernism has exerted over avant-garde thinking over much of the past two decades.”

Moreover, “there was a renewed pre-occupation with the material,” not the cultural.