A Republic
Early morning of January 18, 2003 found me walking a trail down a hillside on the western coast of Palawan. From atop the hill one could see the great expanse of mangrove swamp. On the left side of this wide vista were square patches of exposed boggy land, as if somebody had taken a razor blade and sliced a swatch from the green fabric before my eyes. We were some 30 kilometers North of Puerto Princesa City. I was part of a task force that would demolish a dike system put up on tidal flatland located in a clearing inside a mangrove forest. The clearing had been illegally made. The environmentalist lobby had gotten the court ruling and now we were taking it upon ourselves to execute it. Demolish the dikes.
“Isn’t it true? Aren’t we in the Republic of Palawan?” One volunteer lawyer of an environmental NGO said between his heavy panting. (Having grown up and spending most of his professional life in Manila, he was sweating all over.)
I don’t know what he exactly meant by that. The statement was ringing an assortment of suggestions. The most obvious of which irritated me: We are a Republic. This island I have identified myself with when placed face to face with individuals from other places is a self-contained system. A Republic.
How preposterous can one get? If this is a Republic, we would have been rich by now. We would have been as rich as Brunei now. What with all the oil and natural gas being piped out of our backyard, private investors share notwithstanding?
Thursday, January 10, 2008
An essay on incoherence
An essay on incoherence
How easy it is to forget.
No, it is not easy to forget.
But what gets at you is how difficult it is to find meaning.
All those memories of childhood are still there, even after the purging.
But what eats you is how childhood seems to be a stupid thing to remember.
Childhood void of sentimentalism is just another phase.
How empty it seems when you get to the next phase.
Or how unrelated childhood seems to be to memories of puberty.
They don’t connect.
Or connections are trivial.
There are two principal ways of getting to the wooden schoolhouse. You walk the gravel road inside the campus and veer North along the grass lined path on the creek’s border. Or you walk the gravel road outside the campus until you reach the same school ground. Either way, you walk. You don’t ride a bike. You don’t have money to pay for a ride in a trike. I don’t know, I guess, I never asked money from my mother or father. They had nothing to give.
How easy it is to forget.
No, it is not easy to forget.
But what gets at you is how difficult it is to find meaning.
All those memories of childhood are still there, even after the purging.
But what eats you is how childhood seems to be a stupid thing to remember.
Childhood void of sentimentalism is just another phase.
How empty it seems when you get to the next phase.
Or how unrelated childhood seems to be to memories of puberty.
They don’t connect.
Or connections are trivial.
There are two principal ways of getting to the wooden schoolhouse. You walk the gravel road inside the campus and veer North along the grass lined path on the creek’s border. Or you walk the gravel road outside the campus until you reach the same school ground. Either way, you walk. You don’t ride a bike. You don’t have money to pay for a ride in a trike. I don’t know, I guess, I never asked money from my mother or father. They had nothing to give.
Rounded? Well-Rounded? Non Well-Rounded?
Rounded? Well-Rounded? Non Well-Rounded?
When somebody drops the discourse on non-roundedness, must I still be affected?
It’s a marker indicating that another battle is not worth pursuing anymore. Get my guns on another battle. For this one is not worth winning.
It is a vague issue. At best a discourse on averages.
A smattering of this and that. Tit for tat.
I cannot possibly control how others will take me.
Am I affected?
It is a lie to say I am not.
But as I have said, I cannot possibly control how others will take me.
I didn’t set out in the world to be everything.
I set out to learn. To know those things which I can do best.
And it is a lie to say I still don’t know a few of the issues I am good at.
Should I still pine for getting everything to get the best average?
Now that infuriates me. To do that is the most unintelligent thing.
I am afraid God might take the best things from me if I set my life in pursuit of that vague average.
I want to be able to say at the moment of dying, that final moment of closure, that I did the best I could in those issues presented to me.
Averages are fadistic. And even if I would have wanted to pursue the vague average, do I have to slap everyone in the room with the fact that my resources were meager?
I think it is hubris for a bourgeois “average” to regret that the people living in the mountains didn’t have cellular phones or pieces of modern fad gadgetry. They didn’t know how to go beyond themselves. That’s the simplest rebuttal I’ll give the “average.”
The best thing is I experienced everything I have been though to the fullest.
Do they know my happiness the way they knew their happiness?
I think they do not. The only thing they can do is say I am not a rounded-person because I did not fit their average. I didn’t take the same paths they took.
So what? Must I track back? Retrace my footsteps and take the same paths they took in pursuit of the enjoyment they knew best?
Theirs is really a limited self. Somebody who can’t go beyond one’s self. And when this happens, the other is not worth pursuing anymore. Communication is impossible.
Communication is a crossing of boundaries. A dynamic crossing. And it requires a great mind to really have this dynamicity. The best that the average can do is only to approximate the other, thinking that what it thinks about the other is the actual thing that the other thinks.
Approximation is not dynamicity.
Without dynamicity there is a failure of crossing.
Without crossing of boundaries there is no communication.
What is the value of an average other when you can not communicate with it?
I leave you the question to answer.
Now I sleep. And dream again.
When somebody drops the discourse on non-roundedness, must I still be affected?
It’s a marker indicating that another battle is not worth pursuing anymore. Get my guns on another battle. For this one is not worth winning.
It is a vague issue. At best a discourse on averages.
A smattering of this and that. Tit for tat.
I cannot possibly control how others will take me.
Am I affected?
It is a lie to say I am not.
But as I have said, I cannot possibly control how others will take me.
I didn’t set out in the world to be everything.
I set out to learn. To know those things which I can do best.
And it is a lie to say I still don’t know a few of the issues I am good at.
Should I still pine for getting everything to get the best average?
Now that infuriates me. To do that is the most unintelligent thing.
I am afraid God might take the best things from me if I set my life in pursuit of that vague average.
I want to be able to say at the moment of dying, that final moment of closure, that I did the best I could in those issues presented to me.
Averages are fadistic. And even if I would have wanted to pursue the vague average, do I have to slap everyone in the room with the fact that my resources were meager?
I think it is hubris for a bourgeois “average” to regret that the people living in the mountains didn’t have cellular phones or pieces of modern fad gadgetry. They didn’t know how to go beyond themselves. That’s the simplest rebuttal I’ll give the “average.”
The best thing is I experienced everything I have been though to the fullest.
Do they know my happiness the way they knew their happiness?
I think they do not. The only thing they can do is say I am not a rounded-person because I did not fit their average. I didn’t take the same paths they took.
So what? Must I track back? Retrace my footsteps and take the same paths they took in pursuit of the enjoyment they knew best?
Theirs is really a limited self. Somebody who can’t go beyond one’s self. And when this happens, the other is not worth pursuing anymore. Communication is impossible.
Communication is a crossing of boundaries. A dynamic crossing. And it requires a great mind to really have this dynamicity. The best that the average can do is only to approximate the other, thinking that what it thinks about the other is the actual thing that the other thinks.
Approximation is not dynamicity.
Without dynamicity there is a failure of crossing.
Without crossing of boundaries there is no communication.
What is the value of an average other when you can not communicate with it?
I leave you the question to answer.
Now I sleep. And dream again.
Dumaguete
D
Passing through the national highway that connects “Junction One” and the San Pedro area in Puerto Princesa, I often remember another city. The portion of the road that passes the western edge of the airport is so uncannily similar to the national highway that passes the edge of the airport of another city located some 400 nautical miles southeast of P. However, the sensation of fast moving tricycles and multicabs passing through this primary artery that connects the city to the barrios seems to be the only thing that gives similarity to the two cities I am imagining. As I pass through this strip of national highway in barangay San Miguel of P, much as the two cities of my imaginings are both located at the edge of land, bordering the sea, I am temporarily split in space and time. Differences abound, but I could not immediately place myself in the correct Cartesian map at the precise moment.
I first came to Dumaguete during the summer of 1997. D was the terminal point of a three-day trip I was taking to reach the summer Mecca for the country’s best literary greenhorns; it was to be my home for three weeks. The first leg of my trip was an overnight boat ride from P. Our boat berthed in Manila North at 10 in the morning the following day. I only had ample time to pick-up some clothes in my rented room in Quezon City and hit the mall for some last-minute shopping. At four in the afternoon I flagged a cab and braved the midsummer Friday afternoon traffic to the old Manila Domestic Terminal 2 for my flight south, the second leg of my trip.
The red-eye flight to Cebu was a clunker. There were perhaps only 20 passengers on that day’s last flight to the “Queen City of the South” that I could only see five passengers in my section of the widebodied Airbus. An hour’s flight and I was in Mactan International. After an uncomfortable overnight stay in a stolid area of the terminal building (This was when I learned firsthand that having an overnight flight connection can be a bummer specially when the airport you are in shuts down at midnight. Connecting-flights can save you money, though. Back in 1997, the direct flight between Manila and D was almost a thousand bucks more expensive than a flight plan that passes through Cebu.), I boarded the next day’s third commuter flight out of Cebu 20 minutes before seven in the morning. The twin-engine turboprop climbed out over the eastern edge of Mactan island before banking right towards what was my first glimpse of Cebu in clear daylight. All I could see of the city the night before were orange blips that have been randomly scattered on a pitch-gray veldt. That morning I saw the patchwork of man-made structures and greens sprawled out on a coastal plain going up to a gently sloping inner land that abruptly stopped at towering mountain cliffs in a not so distant background. Such a place: from one single spot you can have a lucid view of the sea, the coastal plain, and the mountains. But this was not yet my destination. I was still on my way to D.
I was back in D in 2000. This time it was nothing out of literary whim. My brother and I were flying to D for another lofty purpose. Hard before the track of a tropical typhoon that eventually caused the death of my province’s most popular long-time political father-figure, we were making a paperwork swing through northern Luzon, Busuanga Island, and Negros Oriental in a back-breaking two-week road trip. Manoy D was laying out the groundwork for his cross-country field survey of an endangered crocodilian species. He needed to coordinate with local field scientists (of whom, the most famous is Dr. Angel Alcala of the Silliman Marine Laboratory in D).
My latest trip to D was in June of 2001. Of all the trips, this was the most unconventional as this was really an unscheduled one. I hitched on at moments notice. My brother woke me up at seven that Saturday morning. They were to fly to Cebu in the afternoon on their way to Negros Oriental for their continuing fieldwork. And suddenly he wanted me to be on the trip! They were carrying electronic instruments that needed to be hooked up to a computer before being deployed in the field, but he didn’t want to lug his computer to the mountains of Negros Oriental. (Battery guzzling equipment are practically not suited for a month’s work in the mountains, and expensive general-purpose electronic gadgetry like a notebook computer is an enticement for unlawful elements in the bush. It is better to take down field notes with pencil and weatherproof paper and reorganize later with a word processor. Even a palmtop PDA is impractical for this purpose because of so much dust and moisture out in the tropical jungle.) Kuya asked me to go with him as far as their jump-off point in the town of Basay southwest of D. That was where I was to set up their field instruments with the laptop which I would then take back to P for safekeeping while they do their fieldwork.
I didn’t learn actual science in graduate school seminars. It was my two elder brothers (two, because another brother was also involved in environmental field work before becoming a white collar public policy analyst) who confirmed to me my long-held beliefs about the vicissitudes of real scientific fieldwork: Days in the field are devoid of melodramatic scenes, of fashion panache and techno savvy. Nubuck-hide hiking boots eventually get soaked in water and crusted with mud. In time one decides to walk barefooted in mud swamps. A sixteen-satellite precision GPS unit reaches its maximum load of waypoint markers. Soon you have to recourse to writing down each dead-reckoning waypoint on paraffin-coated paper lest you get lost and go on an infinitely circular path in the jungle. On my way back to D from Basay, the expensive top-of-the-line laptop I was ferrying was resting on its canvass satchel safely tucked inside a decrepit black garbage bag.
At half past two in the afternoon of the following day, I was back in P. The searing afternoon heat off the tarmac was pushing me in quick strides to the familiar air terminal building, erasing from my thoughts my recent views of another island across the Sulu Sea.
Passing through the national highway that connects “Junction One” and the San Pedro area in Puerto Princesa, I often remember another city. The portion of the road that passes the western edge of the airport is so uncannily similar to the national highway that passes the edge of the airport of another city located some 400 nautical miles southeast of P. However, the sensation of fast moving tricycles and multicabs passing through this primary artery that connects the city to the barrios seems to be the only thing that gives similarity to the two cities I am imagining. As I pass through this strip of national highway in barangay San Miguel of P, much as the two cities of my imaginings are both located at the edge of land, bordering the sea, I am temporarily split in space and time. Differences abound, but I could not immediately place myself in the correct Cartesian map at the precise moment.
I first came to Dumaguete during the summer of 1997. D was the terminal point of a three-day trip I was taking to reach the summer Mecca for the country’s best literary greenhorns; it was to be my home for three weeks. The first leg of my trip was an overnight boat ride from P. Our boat berthed in Manila North at 10 in the morning the following day. I only had ample time to pick-up some clothes in my rented room in Quezon City and hit the mall for some last-minute shopping. At four in the afternoon I flagged a cab and braved the midsummer Friday afternoon traffic to the old Manila Domestic Terminal 2 for my flight south, the second leg of my trip.
The red-eye flight to Cebu was a clunker. There were perhaps only 20 passengers on that day’s last flight to the “Queen City of the South” that I could only see five passengers in my section of the widebodied Airbus. An hour’s flight and I was in Mactan International. After an uncomfortable overnight stay in a stolid area of the terminal building (This was when I learned firsthand that having an overnight flight connection can be a bummer specially when the airport you are in shuts down at midnight. Connecting-flights can save you money, though. Back in 1997, the direct flight between Manila and D was almost a thousand bucks more expensive than a flight plan that passes through Cebu.), I boarded the next day’s third commuter flight out of Cebu 20 minutes before seven in the morning. The twin-engine turboprop climbed out over the eastern edge of Mactan island before banking right towards what was my first glimpse of Cebu in clear daylight. All I could see of the city the night before were orange blips that have been randomly scattered on a pitch-gray veldt. That morning I saw the patchwork of man-made structures and greens sprawled out on a coastal plain going up to a gently sloping inner land that abruptly stopped at towering mountain cliffs in a not so distant background. Such a place: from one single spot you can have a lucid view of the sea, the coastal plain, and the mountains. But this was not yet my destination. I was still on my way to D.
I was back in D in 2000. This time it was nothing out of literary whim. My brother and I were flying to D for another lofty purpose. Hard before the track of a tropical typhoon that eventually caused the death of my province’s most popular long-time political father-figure, we were making a paperwork swing through northern Luzon, Busuanga Island, and Negros Oriental in a back-breaking two-week road trip. Manoy D was laying out the groundwork for his cross-country field survey of an endangered crocodilian species. He needed to coordinate with local field scientists (of whom, the most famous is Dr. Angel Alcala of the Silliman Marine Laboratory in D).
My latest trip to D was in June of 2001. Of all the trips, this was the most unconventional as this was really an unscheduled one. I hitched on at moments notice. My brother woke me up at seven that Saturday morning. They were to fly to Cebu in the afternoon on their way to Negros Oriental for their continuing fieldwork. And suddenly he wanted me to be on the trip! They were carrying electronic instruments that needed to be hooked up to a computer before being deployed in the field, but he didn’t want to lug his computer to the mountains of Negros Oriental. (Battery guzzling equipment are practically not suited for a month’s work in the mountains, and expensive general-purpose electronic gadgetry like a notebook computer is an enticement for unlawful elements in the bush. It is better to take down field notes with pencil and weatherproof paper and reorganize later with a word processor. Even a palmtop PDA is impractical for this purpose because of so much dust and moisture out in the tropical jungle.) Kuya asked me to go with him as far as their jump-off point in the town of Basay southwest of D. That was where I was to set up their field instruments with the laptop which I would then take back to P for safekeeping while they do their fieldwork.
I didn’t learn actual science in graduate school seminars. It was my two elder brothers (two, because another brother was also involved in environmental field work before becoming a white collar public policy analyst) who confirmed to me my long-held beliefs about the vicissitudes of real scientific fieldwork: Days in the field are devoid of melodramatic scenes, of fashion panache and techno savvy. Nubuck-hide hiking boots eventually get soaked in water and crusted with mud. In time one decides to walk barefooted in mud swamps. A sixteen-satellite precision GPS unit reaches its maximum load of waypoint markers. Soon you have to recourse to writing down each dead-reckoning waypoint on paraffin-coated paper lest you get lost and go on an infinitely circular path in the jungle. On my way back to D from Basay, the expensive top-of-the-line laptop I was ferrying was resting on its canvass satchel safely tucked inside a decrepit black garbage bag.
At half past two in the afternoon of the following day, I was back in P. The searing afternoon heat off the tarmac was pushing me in quick strides to the familiar air terminal building, erasing from my thoughts my recent views of another island across the Sulu Sea.
Novels and Places
Novels and Places
Marseilles was ideally suited to Genet’s imagination. Like Brest, where he would set Querelle, it would be bombed severely during the Second World War. Once a place was destroyed, it became a suitable subject. Genet wrote about Mettray after it was closed, Brest and Marseilles after they were bombed, Montmartre after it no longer existed as a bohemian or criminal centre but had become a weekend tourist trap. Used materials ‘composed’ best; that is why novelists like to work with them. Only when subjects have lost their journalistic flashiness do they become suitably cool for serious fiction.
– Edmund White, Genet: a biography
Marseilles was ideally suited to Genet’s imagination. Like Brest, where he would set Querelle, it would be bombed severely during the Second World War. Once a place was destroyed, it became a suitable subject. Genet wrote about Mettray after it was closed, Brest and Marseilles after they were bombed, Montmartre after it no longer existed as a bohemian or criminal centre but had become a weekend tourist trap. Used materials ‘composed’ best; that is why novelists like to work with them. Only when subjects have lost their journalistic flashiness do they become suitably cool for serious fiction.
– Edmund White, Genet: a biography
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