From Rapture To Rupture

If you've got the temerity for a tightrope pirouette and the gall to imagine yourself a contender for the reality show Fear Factor, it wouldn’t be too farfetched to see a camel entering the eye of the needle. Or, the hole of a wedding ring.

Long before Sun.Star Cebu sent shivers down the spines of singletons with its recent three-part series called “Going Solo” — proving there’s an epidemic of unhappiness in the city enough to make annulment lawyers grinning their way to the banks— a whole galaxy of words has coalesced into a common fact: Marriage is a matter of courage.

Forget the flair of the wedding planner who, having read too much romance novels or seen her immodest share of Hollywood potboilers, will have the prospective couple believe that everything in the glossy magazine or in her favorite teleserye is true. Ah, the mirage of two minds admitting no impediment to the pleasure principle in this era of advertising.

Truth be told, no wedding planner takes care about what happens next because it’s really up to the couple concerned to make a sense of rhythm and order, a cosmos out of the chaos theory so true to the frowns of feminists and the caution of the commitment-phobic.

“It is the most challenging relationship any of us attempt in our lives, and an increasing number of us seem to fail,” goes the blurb of Elizabeth John Howard’s book Marriage, titled simply thus as if to leave no room for further complications. It’s one of the gifts my wife and I received when we agreed to go headlong into our common adventure against the unknown four years ago.

It’s a jungle out there after the wedding photographer finds another client for a funeral, probably of someone who succumbed to the sweet hereafter in the wake of sleeping with snakes or swimming together with piranhas. Or so agree with a cuss “practically one couple every 24 hours” who kick themselves to Splitsville, as cited in the special report.

When one writer defined courage as a “conquest of fear,” he might as well have described marriage as a mind-over-matter engagement with reality at the risk of losing one’s head. Or, against the slings and arrows of domestic fortune, ducking under the matrimonial bed. If you don’t have the mind—or the moxie— for it, you could tear out your hair about psychological incapacity, like 95 per cent of the petitioner for annulments in the city.

From someone who came short of murdering her husband, erasing him from her existence the legal way out, it struck me that my friend C. still has the grace to wax hopeful for me and my wife, writing a dedication on the book’s flyleaf: “All the best.” Not for better or for worse, mind you. Something that I wished for her, too, when she opted not let the failure of her first marriage be a closure for finding and fulfilling herself.

Cautionary tales about lovebirds turning targets for slingshots, she got a first-hand account. But that hasn’t stopped her from daring to take a second chance. Hopefully this time, her second husband is someone she could hum an ode with against all odds. And, in the process of partaking the gifts of their individuality, may they become sentinels of each other’s solitude.

To rage is fine, true. But nothing beats the basic or the residual verities of clichés: Faith, hope, love. That, plus the creative spunk and, yes, the courage to chuckle against one’s cynical heart.

In closing, here’s a bit from Howard’s book that singletons might consider for a second look. “There is no greater risk, perhaps than matrimony,” averred Benjamin Disraeli, from a letter to a lady on her engagement. “But there is nothing happier than a happy marriage.”

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Howard's anthology is a treasure trove of extracts from novels, short stories, poems-- all illustrating the changing moods of marriage, from joy to despair. Her choices are eclectic and refreshingly unexpected, ranging from Anton Chekov, C.S. Lewis, Jane Austen, Michel de Montaigne, Erich Maria Remarque, Robert Graves, Oscar Wilde, Franz Kafka, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Gustave Flaubert, William Shakespeare, James Thurber, Evelyn Waugh, George Eliot, George Bernard Shaw, Benjamin Disraeli, etc.

A Runaway Wise Piece Of Advice

WHO says one has to grit one's teeth and be aggressive to wear courage on one's sleeve? Give yourself a break, man. Or kick yourself if you deem it beneath you, as graceless as losing face, to hold your ground when the going gets rough.

Being tough is tritely macho. Or so avers Mr. Somchai, an Aikido master, at the recent 1st Fukakusa Shihan Aikido and Weapons International Seminar in Cebu. There's more to bravery than meets a black eye.

"Running away is the best form of self-defense," stresses Mr. Chomsai after he demonstrated a move to escape from several aggressors and exited as if nothing happened. “The Aikido philosophy is of peace, harmony and unit,” Mr. Somchai explained. “If you are trapped, defend yourself but if you can still run, then run.” Weaseling away from a fight is not a cowardly act, agrees Giovanni Capannelli, an Italian fouth dan aikikai and senior economist of the Asian Development Bank.

You bet, I'm on my feet.

In Praise Of All Fathers (And Their Mothers, Too!)

TO CELEBRATE Father's Day, here's a reprint of my column in Sun.Star Cebu (February 11, 2003) which I wrote six days after the birth of my eldest son, Gabriel Ollivan:

FOR I HAVE SINNED

On the day I was to be baptized, my mother had to whisk me out the window. My father was dead drunk at the door, that’s why. It’s one story I wish to hear straight from my father’s mouth, as though getting the long and short of it were my birthright.

If he saw the film Road to Perdition, my father would have deemed Paul Newman a saint. Amen, thus he could have sworn to what seemed to him a gospel truth after Newman’s character intoned: “Sons are put on earth to trouble their fathers.”

Short of committing parricide, my father and I have done everything in the book to break the tie that binds us. Osmosis is a process easier to understand if the precision with which we break each other’s hearts were a mutual experiment. Yes, being a pain in each other’s neck is a science we’ve raised to the level of art.

How my father lives up to his name, Severiano. It’s overkill to go into details. Suffice it to say that what my father and I do exceptionally well is run of the mill. The movies and the novels have wrung the topic of father-and-son conflict dry, certainly. Look, the slim copy of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons still groans on my shelf, so plump with its dog-ears.

Suffice it to say that as long we’re together, there’s no need to bother about news of an impending global war. There’s always a booby trap in each other’s way, and our silences can be so companionable as though we were the only ones left walking in the ruins of a bombed city.

If there’s anything good at being my father’s son, it is in the way he has inspired me to be ruthless in steering out of his shadow and toeing along the lines of a character in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man who said, “Be your own father.” Along the way, I’ve learned to swallow more than Ellison’s words. Yes, even though nothing is harder to take than softening one’s heart for the sticky stuff called tenderness.

Or something like forgiveness. This, I now know, must be fierce— a lesson I took time learning from my mother who’ve loved and endured without apologies such a man I thought only my grandmother can. If goodness prevails over all things gone awry, these two women in my father’s life can swear.

When my wife underwent a caesarian operation last week, my father stayed outside the hospital. So typical of him, so I thought until my mother told me nearly a week after my child’s birth that it was my father who rushed to the nursery, even risking one of the nurse’s ire when he went beyond the sterile area in his excitement to get a closer look at his grandson. He was relieved, so swore my mother, to see my firstborn safe after my wife’s ordeal at the operating room.

Stories, so I wish to tell my son Gabriel Ollivan soon, must leave a lot of room for revision.

Poem For Papa and For My Sons

SEVERIANO


Summoning the metaphor of stone, his name.
It stuns my tongue to utter it, my teeth
gritting syllables of gravel. So sovereign
it is as his shout calling me back, and I’m
suddenly a child again, mouth agape and gasping
for breath as if father were a word hurled
farther away that I must run after, hurtling me
through hurts unmapped, across estranged acres
traced by trajectories of rage, and gauged by
velocities of loss. Yet the sparks of a stone-rubbed
heart strangely kindles love’s belated
light; its warmth burning this intimate wrath
until it thaws, and smoke unseethes our ancestry
of aches— our common tree— where ire, rock-
rooting, was sired. Once in a dream, I stumbled
on Grandpa’s grave, and I clawed, digging
for his bones, its heft no more than a fistful
of pebbles. Wakeful now, I’m all ears to
the absence of his voice. It roars, swearing
I’m just a chip off the old block: a stowaway
towed by a wayward streak not even the most
severe of beatings could break. Consider then
the river and its heritage of boulders.
Imagine me as the bridge over it where you,
children all forthcoming, shall meet.
Go down the water. Wash your feet.


* SEVERIANO was first published in the Philippine Panorama magazine (April 13, 1997) and later anthologized in the Likhaan: Best of Philippine Poetry and Fiction 1997 (UP Press)

Poem For Papa

INTER NOS

A static in the heart.

We’re mute, mutual as we are
with blindfolds. We’ve seen no evil
or heard while our fingers concatenate
like accidents on the switch.

Whichever channel we turn, the shift-
shape of images eludes us, deluding
the split-seconds of David Koresh, babytalk
on soaps and shampoos, Michael Jackson’s
moonwalk, the CNN war dispatch
and a teaser of a wrestling match.

Wordless, the world is
loud enough in this room
cramped but larger than death.
We’ll be one with the late-night news.
Or else, who will reveal the slaying
of the murderer, breathless
and bitter between us?

We’ll have rest at last.

* INTER NOS was first published in Home Life magazine in 1996 where it won in its Annual Poetry Competition. It’s also anthologized in In Time Passing: The Best of Home Life as well in Little Workshop, Little Critique (both books edited by Leoncio Deriada)

Oh, My Oompa!

EVER WONDERED what sort of animal you might have been in your past life? Thus Tickle Tests (http://web.tickle.com) piqued me curious. After answering a few questions, here's the discovery:

"Myke, you're a Monkey! Don't go bananas — in your former life you were a tiny monkey named Oompa. Here's what we know about you: Adorably sweet demeanor and sharp as a tack, you found success working with a street performer named Juan, who worshipped you and treated you like his own child. He bought you a gold satin jumpsuit with royal blue ruffles, a matching top hat, and a sequined bag for donations. He would play your favorite disco tunes on his accordion, prompting you to dance around and flirt with the crowd while you collected spare change and picked pockets. Everybody loved you. And you loved everybody. You and Juan took your gig around the country and raked in the riches. You were one happy little monkey."

Come to think of it, that's no so awful for someone born under the Year of the Monkey (1968). Could have been bad or worse if I were a rat with delusions of being a bat.

Once Upon a Midnight Run

HINDSIGHT has a way of kicking itself smack between the eyes. And I swear it always occur the morning after, while one’s hangover makes a haze of sunrise.

Early last week, I woke up with my legs’ muscles and my soles screaming for a massage. My buddy Jeremiah and I might as well have rushed headlong to hell, throwing caution to the wind after sousing up at our hangout (our beer bottles sloshing as we whooped up the DVD of a concert in tribute of Burt Bacharach’s music).

Let’s see how far your story holds, or so he challenged me behind his steering wheel en route to where he was supposed to drop me off so I could take the jeepney homeward. That I fancied myself a long-distance runner way back in high school sounded like a tall tale to him, considering my present sedentary demeanor in stark contrast to his manic knack for athletics (particularly basketball).

Outrun each other through the Marcelo Fernan Bridge (spanning the cities of Mandaue and Lapu-Lapu), we agreed. In the middle of the night, for Cerberus' sake!

And so I took off my shoes and my socks so I could dash away like I used to, raring to prove him bluffing isn’t my bottle of beer. He sprinted off ahead of me as soon as he got down the car— and who cared if he was still wearing his office uniform?-- and I followed suit, barefoot and basking in the velocity that could have been the bats’ joy at such ungodly hour. Around us, the darkness was no match to our breathless bravado against the halogen lamps at the bridge ahead of us.

What were we up to, I could only imagine the motorists wondering as they wheeled by. What were we running after? And what if a police patrol or a gang of cutthroats happened to see us?

Though Jeremiah had to concede my lungs can still take an extra mile (and he had to drive me home as a payoff of sorts), he called me the day after and we agreed it was crazy of us to risk cardiac arrest. My wife, of course, was not amused when I told her. Not even if I had to hang my tongue out to the devil by stressing that running was swell. And never mind if I had to swear, with my feet on my mouth and my hand raring to raise another bottle of beer.

If My Life Were A Poem...

IT'S ALL because of these, out of the grace of Divine Providence, for whom I am home and forever wordless with gratitude and wonder.

Writing In Time Passing

(My keynote lecture at the 13th Iligan National Writers Workshop, 22-25 May 2006)

EXACTLY a decade ago, in the morning of the 3rd Iligan National Writers Workshop and Literature Teachers Conference, I sat slack-jawed and starry-eyed while all ears to the keynote lecture of the poet Ricardo de Ungria. It was like listening to a voice from the clouds spelling out the Ten Commandments. You see, when I started to dare find my own spot under the sun of poetry, I was reading—as if it were Holy Scriptures— de Ungria’s collection titled Decimal Places.

I already had the privilege to personally meet and hear de Ungria the summer before that when I got lucky enough to get a fellowship grant to the three-week national workshop in Dumaguete where—like here in Iligan— I did not care so much if my poems were deemed good or bad. What mattered to me then was to get acquainted with my literary “idols” and fellow neophytes primed for a life-long vocation with words. Of course, it didn’t hurt that my greenhorn attempts at poetry also afforded me an opportunity for free travel, meals and lodging.

For a while there, I slurped at de Ungria’s declarations that “the business of making words seems to be a heavenly venture whose pleasures, brief as they are, weigh equal to its burdens.” Now my head still swims with the dazzling torrent of insight about “sense and silence that wait at the end of words… these “pool of sounds deep in the soul that makes silence tolerable and dangerously seductive.”

First Words, that’s the title of de Ungria’s speech. And mine, this morning, are certainly not the last words.

Because, whether I like it or not, what I have to say are merely continuations, a current of ongoing revelations that I’m still wading through, as drenched with wonder as when I stood witness to the flow and plunge of water from the legendary Maria Cristina Falls.

Nothing earth-shaking, my words. I can only swear of feeling what it was like to be struck by a meteor, my knees quaking as they do now, when Madame Christine Godinez-Ortiga asked me to return to this workshop and risk myself being proven undeserving to stand and speak under the long shadow of de Ungria and the succeeding keynote speakers— among them the pillars of Philippine literature who are also this workshop’s panelists.

Immodest not only the honor bestowed upon me by the organizers of this workshop but also my sneaking suspicion that I’m out of place in the company of Christine Godinez-Ortiga, Rosario Cruz-Lucero, Steve Patrick Fernandez, Victor Sugbo, Jaime An Lim, Merlie Alunan (who has spurred me on in my struggle to be unflinching in the demands of the creative life even as she has entrusted and fostered in me the nerve to help in her valiant task in Tacloban to sustain and raise the quality of creative writing in the Visayas--- particularly in the vernacular— through her program called VisWrite) and of course Linda Kintanar-Alburo (who first inspired me to amplify the sound of my mother tongue in Cebuano and to take pride in my promdi identity).

A few years from now, dear writing fellows of the 13th Iligan National Writers Workshop, there will be time to be thankful while reckoning the windfall of grace and meanings out of the mouths of the panelists. There will also be time, plenty of it, to gnash your teeth and bear the burden of choice, either to stop or to go on with the toil, the turmoil, the tightrope thrill inherent in each literary task.

From hereon, the choice is yours whether or not to go the distance and find your own truth as well as your real place under the uncertain weather of the imagination. Yes, while the planet keeps on turning, its tectonic plates continually moving along with the drift of days, the shift of seasons proceeding ever so precariously in borrowed time with the world’s wear and tear.

If you’re lucky enough to survive the greenhouse effect, a nuclear meltdown, a terrorist’s bomb, cancer and cynicism in the next ten years, one of you will come back here in Iligan to be the next keynote speaker and attempt to make a ripple deep in the heart of a new set of writing fellows.

The world will always welcome writers— even if unloved and despite the odds-- as time goes by. In fact, there’s a multitude out there, who seems scared of not making their mark, who fiddle with words to make their presences felt even if their only chance to get published is in their Internet blogs. (According to Technorati, a website tracking the so-called blogosphere, at least 750,000 new bloggers are born everyday to pour out their heart and gall, waxing literary, in cyberspace.) Even if books would be passé and there would be no more trees left for making paper, many will still find and seek warmth in writing, at least, online.

Short of making fire by striking stone upon your hard-headedness, a few of you here might even be inflamed enough to carry the torch of creative writing in the country. Dreaming on to discover new literary talents, you might be awakened rudely how’s it’s like to tilt at windmills, to wear your ulcer on your sleeve and swallow your pride with your spit while you look for pockets of support to tide over your workshops in the long haul.

One of you here would probably achieve a level of success or a certain degree of notoriety, if not temerity, that could serve you well when you’re in the mood for cannibalism over the bone of contention for the next National Artist for Literature whose aesthetics or politics may not be to your taste.

This I know in my writing life so far— etiquette and the ethic for serenity in the face of strife is hardly the birthright of the tribe of writers who can be just as ruthless, not only with their creative cravings but also with their bloody appetite for one-upmanship. Squinting for enlightenment may crack the writers’ eyeglasses, but the green-eyed monster of envy and intrigue may also leave him or her with hair on the tongue for anybody preening with a Palanca or National Book Awards medal. I also know that playing politics and power-tripping are also in the bag of some writers’ tricks, and sometimes they’d even fancy flicking off and out of existence in a puff of smoke other writers—especially those who raise their stakes in national literature by believing the only way “to go global is to go local,” and who get frowned upon for being far from the madding literary crowd in Manila.

It’s a jungle out there, dear fellows, and whatever blood you may spill in this workshop might as well beef you up into licking your wounds and weaning yourself out of the milky-white notion that writing is all about sweetness and light and only for the tender or for the tame of spirit.

As always there’s no stopping the conspiracy against the compulsion for creative writing.

If you have embers in your liver enough to endure self-immolation in the altar of literature, defined by Anthony Burgess as an “aesthetic exploration of the world,” then you’ve got what it takes to withstand the coldness of condescension, intolerance, indifference. To persist in spite of alienation and displacement—this has been the defining characteristic of the creative artist true to his or her calling through the ages.

Never mind the Inquisition. Forget the exhortation of Plato prohibiting the creative writer— the poet, particularly— out of his ideal Republic, consigning to the cave those burning with creative conviction.

Never mind if your exertion in exposing authentic experience and revealing meaning—or how to make its presence felt on and off the page--- often gets whittled down to the wreckage of a deconstruction. “There’s no presence, there’s only representation,” argues the critic Geoffrey Hartman, who seems to have concurred with the philosophy of Jacques Derrida who maintained that “language is inevitably ambiguous” because, well, “There’s nothing outside the text.”

Forget the fatwa on Salman Rushdie and other fatal forms of suppression to which every writer is ever so vulnerable like, for instance, the slovenly economics of publication and the paucity of readership.

Creative writing, as far as some people are concerned, is no less futile as whistling at the deaf or winking at the blind. It makes nothing happen, so goes a poet’s lament. Truth be told, those with Promethean madness of impulse to give light to the so-called human condition have invariably run the risk of invisibility even as they strive for “visible truth” which, according to Herman Melville in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, “is the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things.”

Of the way things are, the creative artist’s version of their presences seems no more substantial than smoke or mist against the public preference for representations of reality as portrayed in the tabloids and television. “Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” wrote T.S. Eliot who certainly could see “the hollow men” out of poets and story-tellers becoming a “paralyzed force, gesture without motion” in the face of public mania for escapism in a time when television and its inventions have mostly become inversions, if not misrepresentation of the real world.

True, the world wants to be entertained even as it needs to be enlightened. And that’s something the bankable Nerissa Cabral can prove now that her komiks novels, like “Bituing Walang Ningning,” have been adapted into box-office blockbusters by Viva Films and, recently, into a telenovela by ABS-CBN where a Saturday night show titled “Komiks” is now getting its fair share of the ratings with its revivals of such classic komiks serials like “Kamay ni Hilda,” “Inday Bote,” “Blusang Itim,” “Agua Bendita” and “Bunsong Kerubin.” Eat your heart out, Neil Gaiman.

Unlike many of our creative writers in ivory towers, Nerissa Cabral could see how real it was, in another time and place, for the readers of Charles Dickens’ novels to wait for its serial form, in installments, to come out at the street corner. A time when Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina was a serialized novel, and Balzac, an indefatigable provider of mass-produced serializations—“gave the still unanimous writer lessons in the technique of suspense, of building to a climax.”

To get public affirmation, would the writer in this unfriendly time for reading be better off with a byline over a glaringly photographed story about rape and murder and mayhem in politics? Or, perhaps, would he rather get his dues as one of the hacks for the primetime potboilers smack in the heat of the network wars? Or how about wishing for and waiting to audition for Pinoy Big Brother: Writer Edition even if Wislawa Zysmborska has maintained that a writer’s job is hardly telegenic and hopelessly unphotogenic?

In the convenient kingdom of the sensational and the one-dimensional— in this golden age of telenovela, fantaserye and reality TV when the prosaic rules fantastic and puts under its spell both the educated and the illiterate— the easiest way to be in a time warp is to talk of the reign of reading wherein the literary artist can find his own “clean, well-lighted place” and drink to Octavio Paz’s declaration: “Poetry is the present.”

But, yes, the poet Charles Simic does affirm Paz’s inebriated effusion when he wrote: “The present is the only place where we experience the eternal. The eternal shrinks to the size of the present because only the present can be humanly grasped.”

For a sobering reality check—in the face of public fascination with fantasy and half-baked revelations of truth— Simic’s words are quite handy: “We can reach the real only by overcoming the seduction of images.”

In the future, God forbid one of you here to look back and recall with a sigh all the shoptalk about craft and admit with a sinking feeling that you have merely skimmed the surface, ultimately drowning in the guilt and regret of someone “who used to write.” Piece of cake, indeed, to eat humble pie and admit nothing’s harder than holding one’s creative grounding when the rigors of raising a family and making a living suck you into a quicksand of quotas, deadlines, bills to pay.

Then again—against your better judgment that creative writing does not pay beyond peanuts— you’d be gasping for breath in utter unbelief because the papers tell you that a witchery with words has in fact caused a wildly imaginative J.K. Rowling into becoming the richest woman in England, beating even Queen Elizabeth. And then, perhaps, you might be struck with a thunderbolt of inspiration and, taking your cue from Dan Brown’s flair for raising eyebrows, write and let yourself levitate with a controversial conjecture: That who keep on wanting to become poets or fictionist or those who keep on running writing workshops may have the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, among other Biblical characters?

For isn’t the passion endured by some creative writers— where repression and apathy are facts of life— also a variation on a theme of crucifixion? Isn’t Veronica’s white hanky etched with the injured face of Christ an apt metaphor for the writer’s blood and snot streaked all over the whiteness of a page?

Ten years from now and beyond, way back since the dark threatened to shadow the light of faith over the Biblical declaration that in the beginning was the word, the writers will still be playing devil’s advocate against their own demise— despite the forces that propel them toward wordlessness.

Displacement may be a commonplace for literary workers in the past, present and future. But Literature has endured, along with those who prevailed by taking heed of the creative call. There’s reason and rhyme, indeed, for Gunter Grass’s proclamation: “A writer is someone who writes against the current of time.”

Blogosphere Blues

WHEN BLOGS RULE, we'll all talk like... Thus Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of Wall Street Journal, waxes elliptical in his article titled, "Disinhibition Nation." Here's more than meets your rolling eyeballs:

Kevin Ray Underwood, the repressed Oklahoma cannibal, kept an Internet "blog" of his compulsions for years before kidnapping and killing a 10-year-old neighbor last week. On his blog, Kevin wrote a lot about Kevin: "The reason for my lackluster social life is a severe case of social anxiety and depression. I'm on medication now, which helps a lot. Well, in ways."

I don't think the blogosphere is breeding cannibals. But it looks to me as if the world of blogs may be filling up with people who for the previous 200 millennia of human existence kept their weird thoughts more or less to themselves. Now, they don't have to. They've got the Web. Now they can share.

Technorati, a site that keeps numbers on the blogosphere, reports that as of this month the number of Web logs the site tracks is 35.3 million, and doubling every six months. Technorati claims each day brings 75,000 new blogs. We know something's happening here but I'm not sure we know what it is.

Typically, a blogger creates a Web site and then, in the pale glow of a PC screen, types onto a keyboard what's on his or her mind. A blog nearly always invites readers to share their "comments," which they do, and which the blogger posts seriatim. People in my business tend to think blogging is mostly about politics on sites such as Wonkette, the Huffington Post or the Daily Kos. There are highly intellectual blogs, such as the Becker-Posner Blog, run by Nobel economics laureate Gary Becker and federal judge Richard Posner. Their April 16 post is titled "Tax Complexity and the Cost of Compliance," with comments.

But in a "Blogs Trend Survey" released last September, America Online reported that only 8% blog to "expose political information." Instead, 50% of bloggers consider what they are doing to be therapy. Some might argue that using the Internet to self-medicate includes many nominally political blogs, but more on that shortly.

Not surprisingly, a new vocabulary has emerged from clinical psychology to describe generalized patterns of behavior on the virtual continent. As described by psychologist John Suler, there's dissociative anonymity (You don't know me); solipsistic introjection (It's all in my head); and dissociative imagination (It's just a game). This is all known as digital identity, and it sounds perfectly plausible to me.

A libertarian would say, quite correctly, that most of this is their problem, so who cares? But there is one more personality trait common to the blogosphere that, like crabgrass, may be spreading to touch and cover everything. It's called disinhibition. Briefly, disinhibition is what the world would look like if everyone behaved like Jerry Lewis or Paris Hilton or we all lived in South Park.

Example: The Web site currently famous for enabling and aggregating millions of personal blogs is called MySpace.com. If you opened its "blogs" page this week, the first thing you saw was a blogger's video of a guy swilling beer and sticking his middle finger through a car window. Right below that were two blogs by women in their underwear.

In our time, it has generally been thought bad and unhealthy to "repress" inhibitions. Spend a few days inside the new world of personal blogs, however, and one might want to revisit the repression issue.

The human species has spent several hundred thousand years sorting through which emotions and marginal neuroses to keep under control and which to release. Now, with a keyboard, people overnight are "free" to unburden and unhinge themselves continuously and exponentially. One researcher quotes the entry-page of a teenage girl's blog: "You are now entering my world. My pain. My mind. My thoughts. My emotions. Enter with caution and an open mind."

The power of the Web is obvious and undeniable. We diminish it at our peril. But what if the most potent social effect to spread outward from the Internet turns out to be disinhibition, the breaking down of personal restraints and the endless elevation of oneself? It may be already.

Disinhibited vocabulary is now the normal way people talk on cable TV, such as on "The Sopranos" or in stand-up comedy. On the Web and on the street, more people than not talk like this now. What once was isolated is covering everything. No wonder the major non-cable networks are suing to overturn the FCC's decency rulings; they, too, want the full benefits of normalized disinhibition. Hip-hop, currently our most popular music form, is a well-defined world of disinhibition.

Then there's politics. On the Huffington Post yesterday, there were more than 600 "comments" on Karl Rove and the White House staff shake-up. "Demoted my --- the snake is still in the grass." "He should be demoted to Leavenworth." "Rove is Bush's Brain, and without him, our Decider-in-Chief wouldn't know how to wipe his own ----."

From a primary post on the same subject on the Daily Kos, widely regarded as one of the most influential blogging sites in Democratic politics now: "I don't give a ----. Karl Rove belongs in shackles." "A group of village whores have taken a day off to do laundry."

Intense language like this used to be confined to construction sites and corner bars. Now it is normal discourse on Web sites, the most popular forums for political discussion. Much of this is new. Politics is a social endeavor. The Web is nothing if not "social." But the blogosphere is also the product not of people meeting, but venting alone at a keyboard with all the uninhibited, bat-out-of-hell hyperbole of thinking, suggestion and expression that this new technology seems to release.

At the risk of enabling, does the Internet mean that all the rest of us are being made unwitting participants in the personal and political life of, um, crazy people? As populist psychiatry, maybe this is a good thing; the Web allows large numbers of people to contribute to others' therapy. It takes a village.

But researchers note that the isolation of Web life results in many missed social cues. It is similar to the experience of riding an indoor roller coaster, what is known in that industry as a "dark ride." This dark ride could be a very long one.

Cream of My DVD Crop

PLAYING FAVORITES is an exercise in self-mutilation. That explains why I would have to wring my hands if I were to pick my Top 10 from my DVD collection. Forgive me if I had to flick my eyes into adding five more titles to appease myself. So here are the 15 stuffs, each of which I have watched at least three times so far (and still raring to get bowled over again):



http://www.hotfreelayouts.com/movies.php

NEXT IN LINE:
1) Partice Leconte's Man On The Train
2) Tommy Lee Jones' The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
3) Zhang Yimou's Hero
4) Rob Marshall's Chicago
5) Sam Mendes' American Beauty
6) Francois Ozon's 8 Women
7) Peter Jackson's Lord of The Rings Trilogy
8) Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List
9) Mike Nichols's Angels In America
10) Walter Salles' Central Station
11) Rober Pulcini's American Splendor
12) Jon Wright's Pride and Prejudice
13) Spike Jonze's Adaptation
14) Mike Leigh's Vera Drake
15) Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard

If I Were A Motion Picture

MAKE BELIEVE is more real to me, sometimes. A hopeless cinephile, I also hope I won't be rolling my eyeballs if and when I'd throw caution to the silver screen and find myself so effing self-indulgent. Here's a sneak peek:




Raising your brow about your own celluloid prospect? Kick yourself and click on http://www.quizgalaxy.com

The Ticklish Matter Of Testing Myself

KNOW THYSELF, a poet exhorted. Because looking at my reflection might be tantamount to molesting the mirror, I deemed it wiser to subject myself to an online objective analysis to see what sort of animal my personality might peek-a-boo at me. So one tense afternoon when the deadlines felt like a cabal of monkeys nestling on my head, I allowed myself to kill time with the Enneagram Test at http://web.tickle.com. What the ancient science of personality says about you, or so Tickle.com took me by the tail.

"Uncovering the complex mysteries of personality isn't just a modern fascination. For centuries, mystics, Jesuit priests, psychologists, and social scientists have studied the ancient personality typology known as the Enneagram. The Enneagram identifies people as one of nine distinct personality groups — groups that were developed to describe the whole human experience," states Tickle. "Understanding where you fit into the Enneagram's typology can provide the key to gaining new insight into your core motivations and attitudes. It can also unlock the secrets to better relationships with others. Take the Enneagram Test now to find out more about what makes you tick and fuels your opportunities for love and success."

After breezing through 46 questions, here goes the verdict:

Myke, you're a Type 9: The Negotiator

"Friends, family, and colleagues likely appreciate this unpretentious way about you and admire the good-natured approach you can take to relationships and life in general. They're also apt to know that when they come to you with a problem, you can be counted on to be reassuring and patient. As a Negotiator, you're likely to be seen as a good moderator and communicator who emphasizes finding equitable, amicable resolutions to problems.

Being a member of this type puts you in good company. Whoopi Goldberg, a champion of progressive social causes, and the late Jim Henson, an inspirational dreamer and world-renowned puppeteer, are also Type 9s.

This means that compared to the eight other Enneagram types, you have a strong sense of inner peace and stability that drives you to resolve conflicts, or potential conflicts, in your path. You're someone who can probably be committed to healing yourself and others while balancing yourself with a happiness that comes from life's simple pleasures."

Won't it be nifty if someone from the United Nations get to read this?

In the World of the Written

Letters in All Writing Systems Traced Back to Nature, according to Yahoo News dated today (26th of April, 2006)

THE SHAPES OF LETTERS in all languages are derived from common forms in nature, according to a new hypothesis.

The idea, in some ways seemingly obvious and innately human, arose however from a study of how robots see the world.

Robots employ object recognition technology to navigate a room by recognizing contours. A corner is seen as a "Y," for example, and a wall is recognized by the L-shape it makes where it meets the floor.

"It struck me that these junctions are typically named with letters, such as 'L,' 'T,' 'Y,' 'K,' and 'X,' and that it may not be a coincidence that the shapes of these letters look like the things they really are in nature," said Mark Changizi, a theoretical neurobiologist at the California Institute of Technology.

Changizi and his colleagues think letters and symbols in Chinese, Latin, Persian, and all 97 of the other writing systems that have been used through the ages have shapes that humans are good at seeing.

"Evolution has shaped our visual system to be good at seeing the structures we commonly encounter in nature, and culture has apparently selected our writing systems and visual signs to have these same shapes," Changizi said.

The idea is put forth in The American Naturalist magazine.

Changizi notes that a basic shape such as "L" can be easily bent to form a "V." He found 36 shapes that require just two or three contours, and he then correlated these shapes to common scenes in nature and in ancient architecture.

"So the figures we use in symbolic systems and writing systems seem to be selected because they are easy to see rather than easy to write," he concludes. "They're for the eye."
Even graphic art that is not necessarily alphabet-based conforms to the idea.

"Company logos, for example, are meant to be recognized, and we found that logos have a high correlation," Changizi said. "Shorthand systems, which are meant to give a note-taker speed at the expense of a commonly recognizable system of symbols, do not."

How Do We Earn Our Byline?

(A lecture-testimony to the fellows of the 2nd Lamiraw Creative Writing Workshop in Calbayog City, Samar, 22-24 September 2005)

ON THE WAY to this workshop, there was no turning back to the facts revealed in the headlines of Cebu's newspapers: A policewoman stationed at the Women's Desk (where the complaints of abused women are heard) was murdered by her own husband. A 12-year-old girl was also killed after her own father and her uncle allegedly took turns raping her. Masked men, in vigilante fashion, remained on the loose after leaving corpses of suspected criminals. Meanwhile, the governor of Cebu had joined the Cardinal's call for an end to the bloodshed between two warring fraternities. On the political front, the city mayor and a congressman from an adjacent city were locked in a squabble on jurisdiction over a reclaimed strip of real property. Elsewhere, of course, the primetime news had been cranking up cliches ad nauseam about the doggone state of our nation: leadership crisis, the circus in Congress, a ping-pong of allegations about corruption, protests galore, and restlessness about an impending oil price increase.

These news, come to think of it, are a rehash of a reality reported in newspapers, say, twenty years ago. The personalities may have changed, but the circumstances remain. Talk about bad news, and there's really nothing new about this notion of badness under the sun: rotten politics, reckless policies, regrettable interpretation on the concept of public service.

Obviously, some lessons we were supposed to know in kindergarten have been outgrown or, worse, forgotten. From these horrible happenings, certainly, we have not yet learned. Or how come we seem cursed to repeat all these things too bad and too boring as they remain true in our times. Strange, indeed, in the face of this so-called enlightened times in the summit of human achievement, in this era of information technology. So strange that the recurrence of this phenomenon patent in our headlines and primetime scoops might as well be the contents of the X-Files any Martian gone astray on earth would contemplate as an interesting subject for an essay on the human condition.

That we are apparently trapped in this vicious cycle worthy of any struggling writer's indignation, that we are running in circles, indicates a failure of imagination. That we appear stuck and trapped in a labyrinth means we have not yet found the way out of the dark. That, indeed, the idea of transcendence and breaking through barriers remain fancy notions devoutly to be wished despite our inventions, our books, our songs.

Failure of imagination is also apparent in the way our leaders and society at large remain in the dark on matters of social renewal and progress that are always the favorite topic of editorials and opinion columns in newspapers and campus publications as well as in socially committed literature. Bad roads, worsening economy, institutional apathy and a sense of drift and despair: these are also metaphors of one simple fact: our limited vision.

How to look at the world in a new light? This continues to be the challenge of every writer, and this is no less of a wrestle than tilting at windmills.

Though World War II, the Holocaust, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem like rumors from the past, if not a figment of a nihilistic imagination, this generation can't be deaf to the demonic roar of its own times: the 9/11 tragedy and the horror of a planet plagued by its its inhabitants carelessness and recklessness that flung our world into the pit of imminent extinction.

Against this backdrop oceanic for an existentialist to drown in, our writings might as well be paper boats, a desperate contraption and artificial imitation of Noah's Ark through the deluge of our worries and our nightmares about doomsday scenarios straight from the movie “The Day After Tomorrow.” These cataclysms are really redundant when we reckon that these natural calamities are just variations on a trite theme of “man's fall from grace,” or how this flood of human misery is symptomatic and symbolic of a world damned by a tide of intolerance, enmity, and inequity. Where hatred and hunger, poverty and politicians are facts of life that also hint of the state of our cultural state of being. Where estrangement from our moral moorings and a dislocation of our sensibility are a commonplace.

Failure of imagination is a matter we may ascribe to our politicians and policy-makers. But this is something we delude ourselves or hope to believe we are exempt from as we dare to play God with the purging and transformative power of the written word, out of that cloud in our head we call creative writing.

This is one power worth struggling for even as we try to tame this wild and larger-than-life creature called literature, as we stubbornly attempt to discover meaning in life as well as find life in meaning. That meaning might be found as we conscript ourselves to a crusade for our culture, or when steadfastly and stubbornly assert our identity even if such identity is shadowed by forces more formidable than us and threatens to wipe out our singular voice with which we hope to amplify our authentic experience to which we are umbilically linked.

Failure of imagination happens when the terrible things in the world, conspiring to cast a black eye on humanity, defeats us into seeing it with cold jaded eyes and blinking away the spark of wonder out of our gaze that ought to glint with the “pure wisdom of someone who knows nothing,” as Pablo Neruda would put it. To find something out of nothingness or the void as when another poet, Carolyn Forche, stubbornly exclaims: “Only if the dark conceives it must I think of beauty.”

This knowledge I owe from Neruda and Forche matters most to me about writing beyond theories and shifting schools of thought, beyond history and politics, plot and structure, the literal and the symbolic.

Despite the black wind wafting about, everybody needs metaphors to live by, and everyone has the responsibility (especially writers) to create order or a sense of cosmos out of the chaos of human experience, as much as we strive for a construction of harmony in a poem, or an orderly narrative in a reportage, a novel, a story.

But I agree there is a something much more simple and primitive and elusive that lies at the core of writing that has to do with the mystery of the created world: the need to approach this mystery with fear and loathing, at first, and finally with hope.“Eventually one must put aside the paradoxes and the explanations and simply write,” averred a novelist.

Failure of imagination, that's something we can not blame on Cseslaw Milosz who referred to his poems as "bearing witness both to the natural wonders of the earth and the demoniac doings of history in the 20th century." That's something we can not accuse Octavio Paz of, as he devotes himself to the idea that poetic activity is revolutionary in nature, convinced that creative writing is an operation capable of changing the world. Writing, he swears, is both "a means of internal liberation and also a spiritual exercise."

Creative writing, after all, can only be an act of faith, of hoping against hope. That, indeed, something can still be saved. That something left for dead, like our marginalized culture and literature, can still be resurrected.

Though our voices may spawn a howling wilderness of disquiet and questions, it's comforting that there's a coda in the Eucharist that ought to be echoed as the bottomline of our bylines: “We remember. We celebrate. We believe.”