semaphore

in a cozy cafe by the ruins, a random bottle vase of fresh flowers.  just there.  a bouquet for the happen-by stranger.  not unlike at all:  these nameless writings: messages adrift in bottles. 

fragments. on ways of living.

1.  (i realize now) not being able to write for a week while traveling is like closing the dam, letting the waters rise.

2.  at least three languages involved.  and how do we float through the surface of understanding and communication?  the language of the empire.  no matter how much we may have our own reasons to abhor it.

3.  like every thing else, the socialbook is part illusion.  there are more stories when distant friends are actually met.  no matter the short notice, no matter the so short a time.  such as:  V now doing kabbalah and learning Aramaic.

4.  a gift of turmeric roots that still need to be planted.

5.  a visit at the sequestered home-museum of a fallen dictator's wife: palpable opulence, palpable greed. 

6.   an attempt to make a red paper doily to impress a girl.  and failing.  the beautiful woman who makes it look so easy, smiling at the effort.

7.  Louis Theroux's Extreme Love: Autism. 

8.  On ways of living, what is love then?  what is love?  a reservoir.
















    

in wild more silent blue

A Reason

 

That is why I am here

not among the ibises.  Why

the permanent city parasol

covers even me.

            It was the rains

in the occult season.  It was the snows

on the lower slopes  It was water

and cold in my mouth.

           A lack of shoes

on what appeared to be cobbles

which were still antique

           Well wild wild whatever

in wild more silent blue

           the vase grips the stems

petals fall      the chrysanthemum darkens

           Sometimes this mustard feeling

clutches me also.  My sleep is reckoned 

in straws

           Yet I wake up

and am followed into the street.

           

           

by Barbara Guest

how good is an old place

maybe only as good as the people you once knew.  or still know.  maybe only as good as the corners and little places, the landmarks that remain.  still there to help you not get lost.  because cities can change over a night, over a blink of an eye.  and streets can always disappear.  buildings too.  whole towns.  countries in mind.  in the same way as people.  as pasts.  especially when forgotten.  or buried under tons of debris.  if everyone else insists, bus routes could remain.  and you can find yourself holding on to the comfort of once again being a stranger familiar to the new old place.

looking for and keeping traces

how reliable is memory?  it is so malleable.  so subject to change and to internal reverberations.  subject to certainty, to doubt, to nostalgia, to loss, to moments of eureka.  subject to internal resistances, to an extent of shared remembering, to a body or bodies of traces, often lost, often kept, often made.  so that.  sitting on this very same seat, by the very same window, at the very same time of the day on a summer, like now, like this, the same furnishings, the same tone, it makes you playfully wonder:  did it really happen?  did you really leave?  did you really just came back?

on friendship and love

a most gentle poem.  
for those who share their lives with dogs.




My Dog




His large black body lies on his bed across the room,
under the French doors, where he used to sleep, watching me.
The vet said to cover him with a blanket, but I can't.

Two hours ago he moaned loudly and let go of his life.
My wife dreamed of his death in Paris but didn't tell me.
I drove home from the airport imagining him at the door,

tail wagging.  He introduced me to my wife in a dog run,
stood proudly beside me at our wedding, handsome
in a red bow tie.  He faced wherever I was, sat staring out

the window if I was away.  If you haven't loved a dog
you'll find it hard to believe he knew it was time to die
but wanted to wait two weeks for me to come home.

I'll spread his ashes at the beach where we walked nearly
every day for twelve years, this gentle creature following me
the mile and a half to the breakers and then back to our car.





by Philip Schultz

go to Indonesia

and take the offer, i want to tell G.  as if it is the easiest thing in the world.  

when asked, "when is M.A. coming back?"  G said M.A. is playing it by ear.  there are no pre-booked flights, nothing on the calendar.  just plans, vaguest possible.  and M.A., wanting to earn more, intends to move further. 

i want to tell G the obvious:  the plans do not include you.  but maybe i am not the best person to say so.  being unreliable, being an unbeliever.

my point is:  if it is love, with all its trappings, it is not impossible to mark the calendar.  if it is love, with all its trappings, the plans must be measurable, must be for two.

Indonesia is worlds away from M.A.  too far, G says.  what if M.A. calls?  what if there suddenly is a plan?  i say nothing.  what to tell G?  take the offer and go to Indonesia.  go to another world.  for now, without her, there is nothing in this old city but lonely.

G says i can take it.  G says i will carry on (while i wait).
i say nothing over coffee, lukewarm, without hazelnut.
















  

azumi, bodhisattva

Yesterday, I spent nearly an entire day watching two quite-lengthy films adaptations, Azumi (2003) and its sequel, Azumi 2: Death or Love (2005).  Originally, Azumi is a multi-awarded mangga series about the life of a young female assassin in feudal Japan; the films were loose adaptations.  

Should one want to, one can always expound on the concepts and/or ideologies couched in the characters; in some readings, for instance, Azumi herself is thought to be a bodhisattva.  

But what most interest me in these two films is the performativity of gender, especially explicit in the swordfight scenes between Azumi and Bijomaru.  Here is Azumi, dressed not unlike a prince  replete with a blue cape; and Bijomaru, as a delicate lady in white gown, seen most of the time holding and admiring a red rose.
. 

a complex relation

so many things have been said about the boston marathon bombing.  but possibly what stayed most in mind, long after the news were over, was how the suspects were identified through cameras.  hundreds of them, thousands even.  from CCTVs to handhelds.  lenses that look and watch nearly our every move.  like multiple eyes of the behemoth that is the System.  the State.  how these eyes are the eyes of the panopticon that is Michel Foucault's metaphor for the disciplinary power.

and when the armed forces moved to make their presence tangible, demonstrating the State's authoritative power directly over people's lives, stopping literally the movement of a town, of a city, we are reminded again of how complex is the relation between the individual and the State.  like separate beings.  even though at times the two may be indistinguishable from each other.

like separate beings wresting for power.
how the State flexes its muscles, showing its strength, saying:  I will hunt you down.  I will bring you down.  you must not be allowed--as no one else is allowed--to question the Order.
how the resistance boldly makes its mark.  taunting:  Oh Power!  see just how much it takes you to take down a 19-year-old boy!

what to tell G

1.  M.A. should have arrived in another world by now.  G left behind.  what G must be feeling, not unimaginable.  possibly beyond comfort at the moment.  time when words fall short.  fall into being nothing.  suddenly empty and hollow.  without weight.  what to tell G?  nothing.  there is no need to reiterate what is already known.  a given: how we change moment to moment, how more so, changing moment to moment from across such distance.

2.  when H passed away, R was inconsolable.  a performance artist, a solo dancer, a poet, R has read and heard all the words of comfort, they have become trite.  they all mean nothing, she said again and again and again.  crying there, in her white mourning dress, on a bench beside a convenience store.  i realized there are no words of comfort for a writer who comforts others with words.  in need of comfort, a loss.  i sat across her and listened, a rewinding, again and again of memory until exhaustion.

3.  who is unfamiliar with loss, and change?  and who does not survive?

4.  there is a scar in my memory and it is all healed.  'though it has rendered me cynical, hopeful, gentle, and resigned.   

tightrope walking

by invitation, i was asked to sit and evaluate a proposal advised by an old colleague a few years my senior.  the last time we worked together was in 1999 or 2000; she was showing me the ropes.  we haven't worked together since, having parted ways.  moving on with our professional lives in one company or institution to another.  and so, when i reviewed the proposal prior to the presentation, i worried.  how to say the proposal, poorly done, was, simply, wrong?

i didn't.  i couldn't.  circumnavigated instead using constructive phrases.  unless absolutely necessary, there is no need to be aggressive or punitive.  as much as possible, cushion the blow.


















   

the best time to travel

the best time to travel is late in the night.  i find that this is the time when people in the city, and the person you're with, becomes both stranger and intimate.  late in the night, the city becomes a place for anonymity and intimacy.  both.  at the same time.  and all the nuances in between.  we can sit on the pavement, on a street bench, if there's any.  i will lean on the lamp post, we can share the only cigarette left, passing it to each other.  and until it's gone, we can preoccupy ourselves with many other things.  trivial, or otherwise.  like the night.  and the cars passing by.  what kind of lives do those people have.  how do they get by.  had we been younger, we would have been impatient.  might already be drunk, even.  beer, or something like it.  and we'd be recounting triumphs and heartaches, and dreams, grand, achievable, or otherwise.  we most likely would end up laughing at ourselves.  finding comfort in one way or another following one or another's crazy idea we'd be lucky to promptly forget the next day because of hangover.  or being not young anymore, we'd decide in the night.  the nearest cafe, or home.  or if you're up to it, we can find a way to travel the next few hours to the nearest shore.  the best time, too, to leave the city.  the crisp wee hours to see sunrise from there.

often we forget our age

except when we run in attempt to catch that ride.  or see playground bars we know we could still lift our bodies in our minds.  when we see kids bemoan their teenage loves and cry "forever" and tellies say stay believing in your own heart.  when we hear someone say "eternity" and how no one could ever tear their love apart.  we remember.  the too many times and too many things we try to un-remember.  and how often we succeed, at times, to forget our age.  when she laughs finding you funny without your knowing in the middle of a conversation; or unconsciously takes your hand without a cue, in the middle of a mall, or a crowded station, or in a car, without so much as the setting of a dinner, candlelit or otherwise.  when you see her performing the feat of braiding her own hair in front of a mirror, hairpin tucked on lips, or at the end the night, just a plain schoolboy kiss, you forget your age.
  
and also except when you have to file those forms and fill the details birth date please and age please, thank you.  

light reruns

When we came in to see the feature, two girls at the back row were already whispering to each other in a kind of annotated version about the film.  We caught the word "mind fuck".  So the movie was a mind fuck eh?  We settled on our seats.  Earlier, the poster near the counter had showed a large ship with a face that looked like a skull; something familiar in the countless times I've visited shops of videos-for-rent, looking for suspense thrillers and horror or action films (never gore) to kill time.  After watching these films for some time, one would notice running threads, both explicit and implicit, that one may actually read them anchoring on cultural theories.  How these films do not as much depict actual monsters than monsters as re-presentations of society's inherent, unarticulated fears.

Anyway.  

In the next few minutes it became apparent that the film, Ghost Ship (2011), wasn't the movie I've already seen, though they were of the same title.  This one wasn't remotely horror, but of something else more interesting.  My date and I would discuss the film soon after, and marvel at the movie's concept.  How the movie was not as much about the plot than it was about the concept.  Or the play of the concepts of fate, and choice, and possibilities lived out from the variations brought about by the "intervention" of human decisions in the grand scheme of things.

The ship in the movie was named Aeolus, of Greek mythology.  The name itself distinct; as Aeolus, in the mythology, were three separate characters whose lives became intertwined in a way that each Aeolus becomes indeterminable from the others.  That the characters boarded the ship sets the theme and tone of the film's entirety; though, of course, I also think that if we attempt further to "read" the ship, we may also most likely arrive at the idea that the ship, of course, could mean something else.  Like life per se, etc, considering that the ship as it is, and the sea, and the act of voyage, are themselves metaphors of something else.   

Then. 

So Jess, the character played by Melissa George, lives the varied, yet singular turn of events as a number of her selves attempted to make decisions to get out of the cycle.  In some instances, she watched these selves, and at some point, even engaged with them.  One always manages to follow a certain variation of events which inevitably leads to killing the other self; but always the cycle remains.     

What did the film say about fate?  About the power of choice?  About the metaphysical world and the so-believed parallel universes where each of the possibilities of our decisions are played out as lived?  About life in general?

We did not answer the questions and let them hang open and called it a night.  At home, the dogs welcomed, and they were let out into the humid, star-filled summer night.

what use is music

1.  some days ago, the secretary called from another world reminding of the government statement report.  that is, to declare on public document my net worth.  which is less than many things.

2.  G needs comforting and i don't know how.  M.A. is leaving in a couple of days and who believes in a long distance relationship that works?  i want to tell G:  either M.A. quits the job or G drops everything to come along.  either way it takes blind faith on love.  i do not tell G any of these.

3.  because who still has blind faith on love?  we're no longer teenagers, or blind twenties.

4.  when my sister is days away, i trust the sunshine and i trust the rain.  but i still go to her yard to water the outdoor plants.

A Kind of Burning

A Kind of Burning



it is perhaps because
one way or the other
we keep this distance
closeness will tug us apart
in many directions
in absolute din
how we love the same
trivial pursuits and
insignificant gewgaws
spoken or inert
claw at the same straws
pore over the same jigsaws
trying to make heads or tails
you take the edges
i take the center
keeping fancy guard
loving beyond what is there
you sling at the stars
i bedecked the weeds
straining in song or
profanities towards some
fabled meeting apart
from what dreams read
and suns dismantle
we have been all hapless
lovers in this wayward world
in almost all kinds of ways
except we never really meet
but for this kind of burning.








by Ophelia Dimalanta

what we know of time

nothing.  except maybe everything else happens simultaneously.  a kind of paper folding, faces on a socialbook showing bright summer on a page, wintry fields in another, all a hairbreadth away.  until made explicit, what do we know?  someone falls on the steps, a relative passes away, someone else forgets.  in the short distance between latitudes, you might be in the middle of a sequence.  and i, just about exactly where you are, on the other side of present.






















  

note to an adventurer

a tempting thing to do.  to claim one is away all the time.  living on a backpack, with a book, a water bottle.  running or walking, or taking the uphill steps.  into more unfamiliar places.  hike or bike the edges of spaces, taking pictures.  photos, trinkets and other souvenirs.  so-called evidences of a half life.

through the looking-glass

photo by K. Kwe

someone read me cards.  i have always been half afraid of taking a peep into the future, like a cheat.  in the same way i try to never spoil a movie or a book or a story, even if told in midst of a conversing circle, how things will inevitably turn out in the end.  in the same way when i travel, with a luggage or a backpack, or when i run to get to know a new city, or new corners in the old city, it is always without definites in mind.  we all know astrology, sure.  and there are always the horoscopes in a page of any newspaper sold around the corner, sometimes even left on the doorstep, if not the yard.  no matter of great genius there, to connect cause with consequence, and to plot possibilities given the circumstances.  what is young will grow old, what is borne will die, and good times can turn bad, and bad, into better.  one can say it is all inevitable.  and yet.  these all do not stop us from loving and from growing children, from caring dogs, from planting perennials.  from collecting memories as if they were dimes, pennies along the pavement found in secret by little children on way to the market or the grocer, holding mommy's hand while crossing the street.  with a happy thought.  who knows, by chance, something pretty and special might just be there.  and we've got a few pennies in hand.

early morning run

when you run, are you running to? or running from?
or running, changed, to come back again?





 

what we want to be

if one believes in a parallel universe, it may be easier to keep peace.  understand discontent.  knowing that one's dream in this universe is real in another.  and this sense of incompleteness we are all feeling is so because it needs to be so for the wholeness of the entire cosmos.

days of disquiet

while running on this foggy early morning, ravens.



how does one write political literature?  it is to be at heart an idealist and a radical, an optimist.  it is to be by blood, brave.  and uncompromising.  and brave.  

no matter some, many, never few, of your friends will be gone without a trace.  no body.  no trail.  save your own memory.  some photos.  stories you retell and retell.  that has no ending, no. it couldn't have any.

to this day, families and friends still look for their missing.  and to this day, there still are families and friends missing.























    

inside a pub

1. inside the pub with its dim warm yellow lights, J played host and made everyone sit and called a waiter and asked everyone's order.  beer, juice, coffee.  i asked beer.  J, coffee.  which surprised me seeing how the night had just started, how the night was still young, and how familiar he was of the place, the people.  his idea to bring everyone in the acoustics pub.  

J, indie filmmaker, sanguine, nomad.  he'd said let's everyone go to the pub, near the terminal, this and that.  leftover of his adrenalin rush, maybe.  how he had performed spontaneity and masturbation, a kind of physical self-love, at the shop an hour earlier and publicly showed the audience his arse.  he got the free dinner for two.

2. inside the pub with its dim warm yellow lights, ours was a table of odds.  septuagenarians and national artists,  political activists, union organizers, young writers gay, realist, and YA, and J, filmmaker, sanguine, nomad.

the band decided to change the last songs in their set.  played their tribal-and-mountain-tribute songs instead.  i sat beside C, who does psychology, and F.  and all of us we all pretended not to know that J had stealthily crossed to the next table.

3.  inside the pub with its dim warm yellow lights.  

4.  inside the pub with its dim warm yellow lights.

5.  i thought of a scene in mind.  you, the chill, the night.   

inside the apple

Inside the Apple



You visit me inside the apple.
Together we can hear the knife
paring around and around us, carefully,
so the peel won't tear.

You speak to me.  I trust your voice
because it has lumps of hard pain in it
the way real honey
has lumps of wax from the honeycomb.

I touch your lips with my fingers:
that too is a prophetic gesture.
And your lips are red, the way a burnt field
is black.
It's all true.

You visit me inside the apple
and you'll stay with me inside the apple
until the knife finishes its work.





by Yehuda Amichai

Translated by Chana Bloch

translating understanding

1.
exactly how does one "experience" the worldview behind a particular language?  i do not know.  even though this i believe:  being able to understand another language, to speak it and/or write with it, is to be able to pass through a glass wall.  i think of this now because of where i am these days, speaking another tongue; because of the manuscripts that need to be read of the same language, but different because written and crafted; because i remember understanding a spoken another and being able to rudimentary speak it, too, even as being unable to read it.  and being able to read another language, and yet neither speak it nor understand it spoken.  what is the measure, then, of multilingualism?  and how true this experiencing of a particularity, a worldview, behind a language?

some time a long time ago, i understood and speak sign.  but when the hands-talking stopped, the understanding was lost.  the skill of trans-lation, gone.

Abad said the first language is feeling.  everything else used to convey it is translation.


2.
a brave young writer's collection reached me this afternoon.  i am asked to comment on it.  the works are burdened with the weight of its words.  the printed attempts to grasp Universe into one's left hand.  in her note, she said she meant to explore divinity and "sense and essentiality, existing and occuring (sic) within the utmost prosaic, but also poetic, function of language".  she called her collection "Quintessence".  i do not understand what she meant.  do not know what to say.  maybe.  to take life and language and poetry less seriously.  sometimes.  and maybe, too, that poetry may possibly be all about simply sensing the outside through looking in.










 
 

on writing from memory

Memory is a bulk.  swaying 
like a big elephant, graceful only
when inconspicuous.  this entirety

of a universe, a dimension, 
a self and that of others' 
similar to that of the now, only

then
i was a child.  and you--
the world a glass terrarium.

dear love

dear love,  these two days i find myself in the mountains in this city of strawberries and pine.  i remember you when i take a walk in the cool mornings, how a day stretches and folds itself not unlike the mountainsides.  this city eight hours away from the rain trees and cottonwoods, the city familiar to me.  the circle of writers i sit with, playwrights, screenwriters, poets, fictionists, we all agree:  how silences and restraint account for half the world.  this art of hiding.